What is Positive Pay and how can it help your business?
Positive pay is a powerful fraud prevention tool that safeguards businesses from losing money to counterfeit, altered, or duplicate checks. It verifies each check against a list of authorized payments, giving companies control, enhancing account security, reducing financial loss, and improving cash flow predictability. It works by comparing key details (account number, check number, amount) between presented checks and the business’s issued check file, flagging discrepancies for the business to approve or deny before payment.
Key Benefits
- Fraud Prevention: Positive pay is highly effective at preventing check fraud, which remains the payment method most often targeted by criminals. It helps detect and stop counterfeit, forged, or altered checks and also unauthorized ACH debits (coming soon) by matching them against a list of approved payments you provide BSB.
- Financial Loss Reduction: By detecting fraud early, businesses can avoid significant financial losses, legal fees, and the staff time required for fraud investigation and recovery. Preventing even one major fraudulent transaction can easily outweigh the time spent uploading the list of checks into your online banking.
- Enhanced Control: The system gives businesses greater control over their outgoing payments, as no check clears without matching the authorized details or your explicit approval of an “exception” item. Positive pay for ACH payments is coming soon.
- Operational Efficiency: Positive Pay automates the time-consuming process of manually reviewing every cleared check for fraud, allowing accounting teams to focus on other core tasks and streamlining account reconciliation.
- Improved Cash Flow Management: By preventing unexpected fraudulent withdrawals, businesses gain greater predictability and stability in their cash flow, which aids in financial planning.
- Reputation Protection: Implementing strong fraud prevention measures like positive pay demonstrates financial responsibility to clients, partners, and stakeholders, reinforcing a company’s reputation and building trust.
How it works:
- You Provide Data: The business enters or uploads all issued checks. (number, date, amount).
- BSB Verifies: When a check is presented, BSB compares it to the list of approved checks. We look at the check number, date, and amount. Payee verification is coming soon.
- Exceptions are Flagged: If details don’t match, we flag it as an “exception” and alert the business via an exceptions tab in your online banking.
- You Decide: The business reviews the exception and tells us whether to pay or reject the check.
