With payee positive pay, your commercial clients can give you a file of the checks they issue, and when you receive checks drawn on their accounts, you can compare them to the information in the file to ensure the checks are valid.
A must if you want to attract commercial clients to your financial institution, payee positive pay offers a host of benefits including the following:
1. Reduces Check Fraud
The key benefit of payee positive pay for both you and your business customers is fraud reduction. When you run checks from your business clients through positive pay, the system flags discrepancies such as checks that don’t exist in the issue file, incorrect amounts, duplicate checks, checks that were supposed to be voided or canceled, or issues with payee information. Then, it sends the suspicious checks to your customer for manual review.
If your customer wrote the check but simply forgot to include it in their issue file, they can confirm its legitimacy with a tap of a button, and if the check is invalid, they can deny the transaction before the funds ever leave their account. This process significantly helps to reduce fraud and protects you and your customers from losses.
2. Offers Value to Business Clients
When you offer payee positive pay to your business clients, you provide them with a value-added service that helps them:
- Automate check reconciliation
- Simplify the accounts payable process
- Reconcile payroll records
As you know, business customers are typically more valuable to financial institutions than individual customers, and payee positive pay can help you attract and retain these valuable commercial customers.
3. Automates Fraud Prevention Processes
Payee positive pay also helps your financial institution to save time and resources. Without automated positive pay solutions, you may have to review business checks manually and reach out to customers over the phone or via email when you detect an issue.
If you use a manual approach for reviewing business checks, your financial institution is more likely to accept fraudulent checks written on business bank accounts, and if your client reports fraud after the fact, cleaning up the issue takes time and money. By automating this process, you decrease fraud, while reducing effort and preserving employee resources.
4. Outperforms Reverse Positive Pay
Financial institutions that do not automate positive pay often turn to a reverse positive pay system, where you provide your business customers with a list of the checks presented from their account every day and wait for them to manually approve the checks.
Because you are sending a long list every day, this process demands more resources than positive pay, and it also places additional burdens on your business customers. Rather than approving or denying the occasional suspicious check, your customers have to go through a list of all their checks every single day.
In addition to placing additional burdens on your customers, this injects unwelcome delays into the check cashing process on your end and can artificially inflate your customer’s account balances if they take too long to mark certain checks as valid.
5. Analyzes Payee Information
If you’ve already implemented positive pay solutions at your financial institution, you understand the benefits of this solution, but payee positive pay goes a step further. Traditional positive pay solutions only look at check data such as check numbers or amounts. They don’t look at payee information.
By adding this additional layer of analysis, payee positive pay provides even more benefits to both you and your customers.
Invest in Payee Positive Pay Now
Do not let fraud cause losses that can ruin your relationships with your business clients. Instead, be proactive with Payee Positive Pay.
Payee Positive Pay can help your bank:
- Automate the review process for checks from positive pay clients
- Compare check data including payees against the information in the client issue file
- Flag suspicious items for manual review
- Reduce fraud
- Improve customer satisfaction for business customer
To learn more, contact us today. At SQN Banking Systems, we offer SENTRY: Payee Positive Pay and we look forward to talking with you about how this solution can help your financial institution.