We were thrilled to contribute to Informa’s Fraud Intelligence publication with an article to explore how locking down your vendor master can significantly help eliminate the risk of an increasingly costly threat – business payments fraud.

Increasingly savvy fraudsters have noticed and exploited all that is involved with vendor onboarding and maintenance fueling a significant increase in fraud attempts over this past year.

Read the article here.

Yakut Akman has 40 years of experience in financial services, covering a wide range of functions globally, including Operations & Technology, Risk Management, Audit, and Regulatory Compliance.   ​

She recently joined us for our Risky Business Podcast.  Excerpts from that conversation are below.  You can listen to the entire interview here.

Ms. Akman started her career at Citibank Istanbul as an Executive Trainee and then worked in multiple locations gaining extensive global experience. Over time, she excelled in Operations Management as a thought leader and a change agent as the financial markets, and in response, the regulatory expectations grew more complex. Ms. Akman focused on process efficiency and effectiveness while balancing operational risks and controls. She sharpened these skills in Internal Audit overseeing new emerging risks. As a Risk Manager of key businesses, Ms. Akman actively interacted with government agencies around the world. She successfully addressed high-profile, enterprise-wide issues by setting standards, building trust and achieving sustainable results.

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.

Wendy Grayauskie, Assistant Director for Procurement at Villanova University, and Miguel Silva, Procurement Assistant for CSU Monterey Bay, joined us for the 4th installment of our podcast: PaymentWorks Presents Risky Business. 

Below is an edited excerpt from that conversation where they discuss how the title of this blog is what keeps them up at night. You can listen to the full podcast here.

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.

Matt Klein, National Fidelity Product Leader at Willis Towers Watson, joined us for the 3rd installment of our podcast: PaymentWorks Presents Risky Business.  Below is an edited excerpt from that conversation.  You can listen to the full podcast here. 

Ed note: if you have even a passing interest in protecting your organization from payments fraud, we highly recommend you give this podcast a listen.  

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.  

We recently spent time with Valarie Van Vlack, the Treasurer at Texas State University, discussing the role of Treasury in supporting the university’s mission, as well as the ubiquity- and creativity- of fraudsters attempting to scam higher education institutions.  Excerpts are below.  You can listen to the full interview here.