Check Fraud by the Stats
Check fraud-related Suspicious Activity Reports have nearly doubled since 2021 with some loss estimates now exceeding $20 billion annually. Help reduce your bank’s risk exposure to altered and counterfeit checks and protect your more vulnerable, lower-volume small business clients with Reverse Positive Pay from Bottomline, a scalable, low-cost fraud management tool.
The AFP’s most recent Payment Fraud Survey, conducted with US businesses, found that checks continue to be the payment method most susceptible to fraud, with 65% of survey respondents reporting check fraud activity1. 65% of small business victims report losses of more than $50,0002 in check fraud. This can be crippling for many of your small business clients, posing a broader threat to business viability and ongoing banking relationships. Unfortunately, the problem isn’t going away anytime soon. Despite these risks and losses, AFP found that 70% of businesses currently using checks do not plan to discontinue their issuance.1
In addition to growing threats from fraudsters, your bank may also face challenges with helping your small business clients understand and fight check fraud. Despite issuing significant check volumes, your bank has no doubt experienced many of your small business clients unwilling to pay the fees associated with Standard Positive Pay or unable to produce the check issue files required to do so. There may also be a knowledge gap—34% of small businesses aren’t even aware of check fraud technologies that could prevent them from becoming victims3.
First Line of Defense
Your bank needs to provide a basic fraud prevention solution as a “first line of defense” for your small business clients who write lower volumes of checks, are unable to produce Standard Positive Pay issue files, or balk at the associated monthly fees. Reverse Positive Pay from Bottomline puts your small business customers in the driver’s seat of their own check fraud protection. Unlike the traditional Positive Pay model, Reverse Positive Pay provides a lower-cost, less complex method of monitoring checks.
Through your clients' existing account on the Commercial Digital Banking platform, they’ll be able to:
- Review all checks paid against their account
- Raise any return requests prior to a bank-specified cutoff time
- View check images associated with Reverse Positive Pay items
Clients and users may also choose to set up email or text prompts, reminding them to review.
A Self-Directed Approach to Positive Pay
Some clients may be entitled to Reverse Positive Pay at the business and/or individual user level through the Commercial Digital Banking platform’s rich entitlements model. Bottomline works with your bank to automate daily check data uploads in an industry-standard BAI format, eliminating the need for your small business clients to produce and upload their own issue files. After the daily cutoff time passes, Bottomline generates a consolidated decision file including bank-defined reason codes for each requested Return for back-office processing by the bank. Banks may configure a default decision (E.g., to return or to pay) for any items that clients have not reviewed by the bank-assigned cutoff time.
