Fraudsters continue to outfox financial institutions (FIs), and along the way, they’ve become more daring. While digital payments are a much more secure way to conduct transactions, fraud sophistication—and the confidence it brings criminal types—has increased, right down to the ability to steal identities or even develop “synthetic” ones. Consequently, every opportunity to put innovation to work in mitigating risk is one to take.
Three critical areas to concentrate your transaction risk effort
Better vigilance and prevention can be provided by innovative technology and can serve as a revenue maker in a time of increasing market pressures. Businesses are keenly aware of the threats that fraud through their FI’s transaction processing can pose and will choose those banks and credit unions that have moved from manual processes to automated ones and have the back-end capabilities to quickly isolate suspect transactions.
Three area where innovation can bring major benefits right now are:
• Dispute tracking
• ACH risk management
• Check fraud prevention
Dispute tracking for the times we’re living in
An unresolved or slowly reconciled electronic payment dispute will lead to frustration that can extend to a client leaving an FI and digitally enrolling with another. There’s really no reason this should happen. Right now, there are innovative resolution tools to handle debit card, ATM, ACH, and remittance transfers for the purpose of Reg E compliance.
Effective fraud analysis and tracking administration of disputed electronic payments can play an important role that will end business clients’ frustration and increase their loyalty. Today, browser-based analysis and administration is possible, and cloud-based tools are in place to take disputes, automate posting of adjustment transactions, and provide timeline management, approval workflow, letter production, and comprehensive reporting.
Taking the risk out of Same Day ACH payments
Safeguarding your FI and business customers against ACH payments fraud with automation is another innovative approach to reduce the time and manual effort associated with ACH risk reviewing and scoring. Given the fraud possibility associated with Same Day ACH, automating the steps in the risk review process just makes good sense. Today, there are risk worksheets that can automate the gathering of data for annual originator review, present relevant activity to reviewers, and provide a comprehensive history of review activity for reporting and auditing.
Extinguish the rising fire that is check fraud
Lately, just about every conversation I’ve had with a bank or credit union leads to their deep concern over check fraud. Fraudsters have become more adept at producing near-perfect checks and signatures and are more actively moving money out of business accounts. Check fraud was described as being “on fire” by one banking executive I recently heard speak, and it’s been said in a number of publications that check fraud will continue to run high with significant monetary loss to businesses in 2023 and beyond.
Value-rich technology is available to keep an eye on checks issued by businesses, validate payees, detect washed checks, and swiftly conduct account reconciliation. Online security measures—firewalls, encryption, analytics, multifactor authentication—combined with fraud-detecting solutions like check—as well ACH—positive pay create a comprehensive security strategy that shows your commitment to protecting your business client.
Join Q2 for a candid assessment of transaction risk in 2023
Given the transaction risk FIs are facing, Q2 is bringing our experts together in for three webinars to discuss the present environment and offer insights into the technologies available to significantly less fraud while giving businesses greater confidence in the FIs to protect them.
Learn more about the upcoming series, "Manage Your Transaction Risk Better in 2023" and enroll to attend all three sessions or just the one or two that interest you most.
