Check fraud is not a new problem. Neither is positive pay. For decades, financial institutions have offered it as one of the most reliable, effective tools for protecting business customers from check fraud. The challenge, as any banker who has tried to drive adoption will tell you, is getting business customers to use it consistently.
That was the central theme of a CONNECT 26 session featuring: Andrew Moore, Senior Product Manager at Q2; Ryan Johnson, Chief Customer Officer at Monit; and Thomas Eorgan, Director of Sales Enablement at Bank of Tennessee. They walked through how to make the path to consistent adoption—which leads to consistent protection—an easier one for business customers to follow.
Everyone knows check fraud is still a pervasive problem. The 2026 AFP Payments Fraud Survey report found that 58% of businesses experience check fraud and that checks remain the most targeted payment method, outpacing ACH and wires. MeanwhileQ2 Centrix Positive Pay stopped approximately $2 billion in check fraud in 2024 and 2025 combined. That’s proof that when businesses use the solution, it delivers.
But another number tells a harder story: A 2024 Datos industry report found that 71% of financial institutions are dissatisfied with their positive pay adoption rates.
Closing that gap between a proven product and its real-world usage was the focus of the conversation.
Centrix Positive Pay doesn't require businesses to do anything complicated. What it does require is that they keep it supplied with accurate, timely check issuance data. That's where things have historically gotten difficult.
The process—exporting a check file from an accounting system, formatting it correctly, logging into online banking, uploading it on time—lives entirely outside the product. It's a workflow burden that lands on the business customer's plate, and it has to happen consistently for positive pay to do its job.
"Positive pay is the only solution we offer customers with a to-do list attached to it," said Eorgan. "It's like, here's your great product, and here's all the stuff you've got to do to support it."
Julie Moore, who runs Appalachian Christian Camp in East Tennessee, knows that experience firsthand. As a Bank of Tennessee customer, she was using positive pay. but making it work meant manually downloading a check report from QuickBooks, then logging into online banking to upload it, every time checks were processed.
"Especially during our busy seasons," she said, "it could be a little bit of a challenge for me to remember to do that."
It's a been a frustrating challenge to bridge the gap between a small business's accounting workflow and the positive pay system waiting to receive that data.
That's the problem CheckSync by Monit was built to solve. It integrates directly with small business accounting packages—currently QuickBooks and Xero—and delivers the check data pipeline directly into Centrix Positive Pay.
The setup is simple: A business logs into online banking, selects CheckSync, connects their accounting package, and maps their accounts. That's it. From that point forward, CheckSync looks for newly issued checks every hour and pushes the data through automatically to Centrix Positive Pay. No downloads, no formatting, no manual uploads.
The fraud protection Centrix Positive Pay has always provided is still doing the work. CheckSync just ensures the solution has what it needs to do that work, while easing the burden on the business customer.
Here’s Julia’s positive pay experience since implementing the Q2/CheckSync integration:
"It is a very smooth process now. We rarely have notifications that we have to go in and manually approve. It does give us a great sense of protection."
Consistent adoption doesn't just benefit business customers. It also improves the operational outlook for financial institutions.
Bank of Tennessee's experience offers a concrete example. Before CheckSync, a cash management employee spent roughly three hours each morning managing positive pay. That time was dedicated to handling exceptions, following up on late or missing uploads, and walking customers through file formatting questions. With CheckSync in place, that capacity has been largely recaptured.
"We've freed up an entire one-third of a full-time employee just from that one instance of not having to manage positive pay every day," Eorgan said.
The sales conversation has shifted as well. Positive pay used to come with a lengthy explanation of everything the customer would need to do on their end. With CheckSync in the picture, that to-do list is gone, making the pitch simpler and the objections easier to handle.
"With new customers that come on to positive pay, if we show them the process of the automation and how it works in the back end, that's just a huge selling point," Eorgan said.
Once the friction problem is solved, the next question becomes: how do you scale it?
Monit's analytics engine uses metrics such as check-writing volume, accounting package usage, and enrollment status to help institutions identify which customers are the strongest candidates for Centrix Positive Pay. Treasury management teams get a prioritized target list, including customers who started enrollment but didn't complete it.
The downstream implications can extend beyond fraud prevention. One bank using CheckSync saw an early but notable data point: a 3% increase in deposits at one client. Johnson believes it points to something bankers have long suspected: Operational simplicity isn't just a convenience. It can be a differentiator that creates competitive gravity.
"If you're looking at the bank down the street versus you," Johnson said, "and your positive pay doesn't require any work while they're requiring 10 to 15 minutes, you're going to start to see that gravity come across."
Consistent adoption doesn't happen at a single point in the customer lifecycle. It requires reducing friction throughout the entire journey: identifying the right prospects, making the sales conversation easy, onboarding customers quickly, and making the day-to-day experience effortless.
CheckSync addresses the daily usage challenge directly, but Q2's investment in Centrix Positive Pay spans all those stages. The goal, as Moore framed it, is straightforward:
"Fraud protection only works when customers actually use it. Remove friction, adoption follows."
To learn more about Centrix Positive Pay and its integration with CheckSync by Monit, visit the resources below — or reach out to start a conversation.