At PaymentWorks, we are passionate about secure vendor onboarding as the lynchpin of secure payments.  When nearly three quarters of organizations have actual or attempted payments fraud scams aimed at them, we know that finding ways to gain peace of mind when it comes to avoiding these scams is keeping a lot of you up at night.  

Think your bank account verification process confirms ownership? Think again.

How procurement and finance departments verify banking information generally falls into these three buckets:

1. Collecting a voided check or account info on bank letterhead
2. Calling the vendor to confirm the change
3. Multi levels of internal approvals for changes

All of these seem, on the surface, to be solid, but are not infallible in defending the vendor master from infiltration by fraudsters.  If your organization is relying on any of these three ways to ensure the validity of your vendor master file's banking info, you are likely leaving holes wide enough for a fraudster to walk right in. 

Let’s break each one down:

John Wilkerson is so passionate about the American Rescue Plan Act it feels like family to him.

"This has become my life's work," he says. "I will not have any more kids, I can't imagine, but if I do I will name it ARPA after the American Rescue Plan Act."

Listen to our entire podcast with John Wilkerson here.

If you think he's kidding, guess again. Wilkerson has served the last 15 years as general counsel to the Arkansas Municipal League and takes great pride in helping 500 cities and towns across Arkansas develop and implement strategies to become stronger financially.

ARPA was passed by Congress in response to the Covid-19 Pandemic, and while one big bucket of the funding must go towards fighting Covid, there's much more that can be done with the money that Congress has allocated.