Don't treat those as personal names, then. Expose the bank's interface to your user. If the bank is asking for "first and last name", then say, "the bank is asking for your first and last name; what do you wish us to tell them?"

The customer doesn't really care if it's going into a bank, CC processing (my case), a hotel registration system (also my case), or a soulless SAP installation somewhere in the guts of your company (yes, this is also my case). They're also used to dealing with this (in my opinion unfortunately), but usually not that interested in reading excuses.

FWIW, we only ask for first/last name where relevant (i.e. billing information), but splitting hairs and asking for both is more bother for the user than it's worth.

> but splitting hairs and asking for both is more bother for the user than it's worth.

Then don't. Be honest and don't ask for personal names at all. Ask for billing information.

The "name" fields in billing forms are not personal names. They're keys by which the billing system can correctly identify the account to access. Don't try to pretend that you know someone's name just because you have their billing information. That's lying.

Especially in cases as simple as a customer who is using someone else's credit card to pay for your service. That name is definitely wrong even if one is John Smith and the other is Jane Doe.

I can only agree. It's absolutely horrendous UI to ask for anything other than "what is your name?". It's incredibly unfortunate that various systems that one has to integrate with all have their own inadequate representation of names (given/last, given/middle/last, etc.) when everybody would probably be happier with a single Unicode string "name". :(