You can eliminate payment fraud from your company without fancy software

Let’s be honest, you do not need a fancy software to reduce the payment fraud in your company. There are very well known practices that you can apply that will reduce the risk of fraud, and I want to show you what some of those best practices are.

Before we continue, let’s acknowledge a very inconvenient truth: Fraudsters understand the banking and financial system much better than we business people usually do, and this is a reality whether we like to accept it or not.

In order to match their knowledge, there are a few things we can do without implementing some fancy software in our company:

1.- Keep up with Fraudsters best practices and the newest ways on how they commit fraud. Companies such as Experian, Transunion or even the US Government usually show lists of the most important scams of the year. Yes, it sounds like an Oscar award nomination for the ones who get there. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single list of the all scams out there to show you, but I’m sure you can google it and spend some time finding the ones that affect your business the most, particularly when It comes to payments. It might be a bit time consuming, but you can still do it

2.- Mandatory vacations. This one probably applies to companies with more than 2 employees. Usually, one of the best practices is to rotate your personnel or send them on mandatory vacations. That way, if an employee is compromised, any potential fraud could be discovered. This is a great way to avoid scams, and who wouldn’t want vacations anyways. If you are a small business, I’m sure you’ll be able to keep up with the workload when a key employee leaves the office for a few days (maybe not... but hey, is a “best practice”) 

3.- Have a computer designated for online banking use. We all know how easy is to have your computer hacked in a coffee shop or basically anywhere where there is free-wifi. By having a specific computer designated for the company’s online banking account, you reduce the risk of being hacked. It might be a bit inconvenient if that computer is also used for other purposes during the day, but at least you have less risk of fraud, which we all know is more important than answering your customer’s questions or closing the next sale

I think you know where this is going…

I could continue by telling you that you also should click the button “forward” instead of “reply” and write the e-mail address again when you want to answer a specific question on vendor payment topics. Maybe you can also review the OFAC list periodically to avoid sending money to sanctioned accounts. And why not, update all your contact information in the vendor files periodically, you might send money to the wrong place and getting it back could be a bit challenging

The main point here is that, YES, you can change your processes to become more efficient and avoid all kinds of problems. The question is, are you confident you can do it yourself?