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!

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.

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.

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.