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.

Clayton Deutsch has been a strategic advisor to PaymentWorks since our early days, bringing us decades of experience in the financial sector, most recently as CEO of Boston Private Bank.  Prior to that he was a managing director at McKinsey.  Clay brings an unrivaled perspective on what risk assessment entails and what is at stake for a company if a payments fraud gets through.  Our head of strategy and market development, Taylor Nemeth, recently sat down with Clay to discuss why it’s so difficult to solve the problem of securely and efficiently onboarding vendors, and how this problem contributes to the overall risk a company needs to manage.

Originally recorded for our initial podcast,  the conversation is excerpted below and has been edited for clarity. You can listen to the entire podcast here.

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.

What the FBI’s latest IC3 report tells us about cybercrime and business payments fraud

At PaymentWorks, we tend to get more excited than most people about the annual report from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). It’s a missive from the front lines of the fight against internet-based fraud – which is a major contributor to the plague of payments fraud.

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.