Forged and counterfeit checks are a huge vulnerability for businesses. Think of every expense a business has. Between payroll, vendor relationships and the supplies necessary to do business, there can be many expenses to count. Yet, it’s very important for every transaction to be accounted for, or the business can become susceptible to check fraud.
What Is Positive Pay?
Positive Pay is a commercial fraud protection service. Businesses provide an overview of daily check writing activity to their banks, so any check transactions can be matched against this list before payment is issued.
For instance, let’s say your business issues payroll every two weeks. If you have 100 employees, there should be 100 checks issued twice a month for the same amounts. When the list of employees and salaries is provided to your bank, they will match each check before it’s cleared for payment. If any mismatched checks are found, they will not be cleared without confirmation of legitimacy from the business.
Ion Bank makes the Positive Pay process easy for our business banking customers. We notify you via email of any discrepancies, so all you have to do is log into online banking, view the transactions and make your decision.
How Protect Your Business
If a business does not put security checks like Positive Pay in place, identity theft and potential bankruptcy could result. Rather than putting your company and its employees at risk of financial crisis, what other steps can you take to bank safely?
- Use multi-factor authentication. Business checking and savings accounts tend to have higher balances than consumer accounts, so it’s especially important to use two methods of account holder authentication. For instance, a PIN and fingerprint.
- Keep company and personal computers up-to-date with the latest anti-virus software to avoid a data breach. The last thing a business wants is to inadvertently release sensitive customer information to the public.
- Employees should have strong passwords for every login. Do not use any personal information like birth dates, social security numbers or anniversary dates. A strong password should be at least 8 characters with letters, numbers and symbols.
- Limit employee access. The more people who hold the key to sensitive information, the more likely it is to be released. Administrative access also presents the possibility of someone unintentionally downloading a malicious software program that affects the whole company.
- Review basic cyber safety tips with employees. Make sure the webpages you view are secure, do not open suspicious email attachments, avoid using public Wi-Fi, etc.
Spend more time running your business and less time worrying about banking fraud. To learn more about Positive Pay and other great tools for your business, contact us today!