Cyber criminals stole more than $28 billion through email fraud from 2016-2020, according to the FBI.  Let that sink in.

David Kurrasch, President of Global Payment Advisors and a Financial Service consultant with decades of experience in the payments industry, recently sat down with us for a lively and far ranging conversation around ACH, banks and payments fraud risk.  Excerpts are below.

Dave Kurrasch, President of Global Payments Advisors, has worked in corporate treasury, banking and consulting for over 40 years. His career started as a cash manager at a large, diversified corporation where he ran the day-to-day cash desk, short term borrowings and investment, and bank relationships. Dave joined Wells Fargo Bank as Vice President and National Sales Manager for the Bank’s Treasury Management Division and later was promoted to Senior Vice President in charge of the Bank’s Treasury Management Product Development and Management operations. Dave and his team were responsible for all product development, risk and fraud management, unit costing and profitability analysis.

After 15 years at Wells Fargo, Dave founded Global Payments Advisors in 1997 and has provided consulting advice and contracting services to banks, corporations, universities, governments and FINTECH start-ups in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. He has deep experience in all facets of treasury management, payments, risk and fraud management and their statutory/regulatory compliance.

Spoiler alert: the scourge of business payments fraud is not going away. The challenges facing organizations with maintaining and securing their vendor master data were already daunting in a pre-Covid world, never mind now that the way people work has been radically reimagined. 

Against this backdrop, we were thrilled to host a panel discussion, "Payments Fraud and Your Vendor Master: Uncovering Hidden Risks," where we brought together Clay Deutsch, a former bank CEO, Rob Unger from Nacha and Thayer Stewart, our CEO, to provide their divergent perspectives on the problem of business payments fraud, and what organizations should be doing to combat it.

Mistakes are going to happen in any business, at least any business that involves humans. There really isn’t any way around that. 

While it would be wonderful to eliminate the scourge of mistakes completely, that just isn't realistic. The goal, instead, should be to minimize exposure to risks while decreasing the high costs that come with onboarding and maintaining your vendor master. And make no mistake, the costs are indeed high. Benchmarking among our customer base indicates it costs $100-200 to onboard and maintain each of your vendors, each and every year you keep them on your vendor master!  

We have five ways your vendor master is costing you money, along with some practical advice on how to keep those costs down.

Compliance is not anyone’s favorite word. The angst and tension many procurement and AP staff work with on the daily is only exacerbated by the worry of accidentally violating terms of compliance.  There are the considerations of the external world, such as the OFAC and debarment lists that haunt payments professionals (hello giant federal fine!), but there is also the world of internal compliance- much of it shifting with stunning regularity.  

Mapping the landscape of insurance that businesses require to secure their property, assets, and employees is a massive and complex task. Policies are simultaneously hyper-specific and unintelligible; counsel and executives alike can find the paperwork confusing or obtuse.

Trying to maintain business-critical services while working from home comes with plenty of challenges, but telecommuting isn’t new for everyone: the Office of Financial Affairs at University of Texas, San Antonio, has been doing it since 2018. As one of the very first finance teams in higher ed to move their processes permanently off campus, they’ve learned a lot about what it takes to operate as a team when everyone is working from home. 

We sat down with Sheri Hardison, AVP for Financial Affairs and University Controller at UTSA, to talk about the benefits and challenges of operating a fully remote finance department - and what her advice is for teams who are just now making that change.

Higher education organizations are a prime target for business payments fraud. So how can procurement and AP departments secure their vendors’ data and payments? A recent PaymentWorks panel discussion highlighted the need for increased focus on managing payee identity within higher ed institutions. Here are some of the key takeaways.