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.

In the course of building our network and our platform, we did what product people do: we talked to the market.  When it comes to the risk associated with vendor onboarding, everyone we spoke to was united.  However, when it came to how to solve it, consensus was elusive. Vendor management, AP and Procurement personnel know they should not trust banking information that arrives via email.  That is a given. To solve this most seem to focus verifying vendor banking information.  But what, exactly, does that mean?

How banking information gets 'verified', 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.  The devil, as they say, is in the details. 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.

Our CTO and co-founder Alan Greenblatt answers all the questions from Threat.Technology about who we are at PaymentWorks, and where we are going.

We talk a lot (I mean A LOT) around these parts about the constant threat posed to organizations when it comes to business payments fraud.  And you can see why:

• 74% of companies reported they were the target of an actual or attempted payments fraud scam in 2020- AFP Payments Fraud and Controls Survey, 2021
  
  
• Email compromise scams accounted for $2B in losses in 2020 - FBI Internet Crime Report, 2021
  
  
• 62% of financial losses due to social engineering frauds were the result of either an absence of controls, human error, or a process not being followed- Willis Towers Watson database statistic, 2020

The problem is, numbers this huge can tend to make a problem seem unknowable and unsolvable.  Especially since we very rarely get to learn exactly what happened. When an organization suffers financial losses due to a fraudster, they are usually unwilling or unable to share the details publicly, so the financial community as a whole doesn’t get to learn anything that could help them to avoid the same fate. 

Until now.

"I feel as if I am holding a hand grenade with the pin pulled."

This is an actual quote from one of our customers, before she was a customer.  We hear versions of this all of the time when we speak to prospects. People are scared. 

Check out this helpful article featured in University Business and written by our valued customer, Lisa Doherty, procurement analyst with Texas State University. 

As industry statistics continue to rise around the threat of business payment fraud, Lisa shares best practices for a better vendor management process to mitigate these mounting risks -  targeted more often than not at AP and procurement departments. 

As a one-woman shop with 30,000 vendor relationships to manage, Lisa is well versed in the challenges associated with managing the constant flux of information while balancing internal expectations efficiently.  Relying our business identity platform to automate a manual and often error prone vendor management process as well as executing her own daily tasks, Lisa is confident in the accuracy and reliability of vendor information, critical to safeguarding her organization from fraudulent behavior. 

Check out the full article, “5 tips for a clean (and fraud-free!) vendor master file,” HERE and let us know your tips for better vendor management!

Hopefully, you have already read the highlights from the first part of our absorbing interview with Dave Birch. (You can listen to the podcast here.)

And if you have then by now you know that as one of the industry's top money experts he writes books and advises companies, among his many endeavors. Birch's name and reputation is well established in the field of identity. 

But that doesn't mean he is any different from anyone else who has to go through the exhaustive efforts of proving their identity. As an executive officer of a company that was entitled to some pandemic assistance last year, Birch needed to provide proof of his address in order to facilitate what he referred to as "this ridiculous process."

Our most recent podcast guest, David Birch, had so many insights into the world of identity that we’ve created a two part blog of his highlights. Our conversation was wide-ranging and fascinating, but don’t just take our word for it, you can hear the entire interview here.

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

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.