Fraud isn’t just a risk; it’s a reality. Every year, businesses lose billions to fraud, and as check and ACH fraud becomes more sophisticated, even well-run, well-funded companies are vulnerable. The threat isn’t limited to small operations or startups — larger businesses, with more accounts, more vendors, and more moving parts, are often a valuable and easy target.
So what do you do when the enemy gets smart? You get smarter. With the right know-how, tools, and timing, you can thwart unauthorized transactions before they hit your account, stop fraudulent checks in their tracks, and build a layered defense that protects what you’ve worked so hard to build. Here’s how.
Why Fraud Prevention Matters More Than Ever
Larger businesses aren’t immune to fraud; they’re prime targets. Fraud has evolved from opportunistic theft to organized, targeted schemes that exploit scale and process gaps.
That means a single successful fraud attempt can ripple through a host of important areas: payroll, vendor payments, and cash flow forecasting, to name a few. Prevention is no longer a problem for just your IT or treasury departments; it’s a strategic priority that protects revenue and keeps executive leadership focused on growth rather than remediation.
But it’s more than that. Beyond the dollars lost, fraud undermines your business’s credibility with vendors, lenders, and customers. For established organizations, credibility is a competitive asset — one that’s expensive to repair after it’s damaged. Modern fraud prevention is about safeguarding that asset through predictable controls: verifying transactions, enforcing separation of duties, and embracing bank-grade tools that make fraud easy to spot and reject in real time.
Your First Line of Defense: Positive Pay
Think of Positive Pay as your daily fraud checkpoint: You upload an authorization file (check numbers, amounts, payees, effective dates), and your financial institution flags any mismatches as an exception to review. It alerts you if it spots anything out of place, giving you the opportunity to reject the fake transaction before it can hurt your company. For businesses with high volumes of transactions, that single step removes the most common avenue for check- and ACH-based losses.
Ultimately, Positive Pay helps you:
- Stop fraud as soon as possible. Items that don’t match the file can be returned, giving your company the opportunity to investigate.
- Create an auditable trail. Each file upload and exception decision becomes part of a control record, which is useful for audits, insurance claims, and internal reviews.
- Reduce reliance on detective work. Rather than sifting through cleared transactions, your team focuses only on exceptions, saving time and reducing human error.
Positive Pay isn’t a silver bullet, but for established businesses it’s a pragmatic, impactful control that transforms your transaction volume into visibility, letting you prevent most check- and ACH-based fraud before it ever becomes a loss.
Other Smart Safeguards to Layer In
While Positive Pay is powerful, the best defense is layered: combine bank-grade tools, internal process controls, and staff awareness so one gap doesn’t become a catastrophe. Here are a few practical safeguards to add alongside Positive Pay, with tips on how to accomplish them.
Dual Control and Role-Based Permissions
- What they do: They separate duties so no single person can initiate and approve high-value or high-risk payments.
- Why they matter: They reduce insider risk, enforce accountability, and are a key control during audits.
- How to use them well: Define role limits. Require two approvers for exceptions above a specific monetary limit, then log every approval decision.
Real-Time Alerts and Monitoring
- What they do: They notify your treasury and security teams about unusual activity — things like large transfers, out-of-pattern vendors, or repeated failed attempts.
- Why they matter: Faster detection means faster containment and less financial impact.
- How to use them well: Tune your alert thresholds to avoid alert fatigue, then assign clear escalation paths for each alert.
Secure Payment Platforms
- What they do: They lower your reliance on paper checks and vulnerable data by using encrypted payment rails or tokenized credentials.
- Why they matter: Less exposed account data means fewer opportunities for fraud. Simple as that.
- How to use them well: Using a secure portal, move recurring vendor payments to virtual cards or ACH. Require tokenized credentials for API-based transfers.
Employee Training
- What it does: It teaches AP, HR, and procurement teams to spot red flags like phishing emails, last-minute payee changes, or unusual invoice formats.
- Why it matters: People are often the first line of defense, and prepared employees tend to escalate red flags sooner.
- How to do it well: Run short, role-specific drills and share monthly fraud trend summaries so teams learn from real examples. Make sure all employees are trained to face common scams, like email compromises, deepfakes, and suspicious asks from executives.
Take Action to Prevent Business Fraud
You’ve built something worth protecting. Now turn insight into action with a few focused steps that tighten controls, reduce exposure, and make your business harder for fraudsters to touch.
- Run a short risk review that maps high-value payment flows, accounts with the most exposure, and vendors with frequent payment changes.
- Enable and integrate Positive Pay with an ICCU Treasury Services Officer.
- Layer complementary controls by adding role-based permissions, real-time alerts, and secure payment platforms so a single exception doesn’t become a catastrophe.
- Train and test your teams by running short, role-specific exercises and sharing monthly fraud trend briefings.
- Document and insure your processes with auditable logs of uploads and exception decisions, insurance coverage, and your own incident response playbook.
Business fraud is persistent, but it’s beatable. With bank-grade tools like Positive Pay, layered internal controls, and a culture that spots and escalates red flags, you can reduce risk, preserve reputation, and keep leadership focused on growth rather than recovery. Protecting your cash is protecting your future — and the right combination of technology, process, and people makes that protection real.
ICCU can help you move from strategy to execution. Our Treasury Services Officers will review your payment workflows, recommend Positive Pay and ACH filter settings tuned to your risk profile, and support integration with your existing systems.
If you’re ready to tighten defenses, schedule a meeting with an ICCU Treasury Services Officer to get started quickly and confidently.
