2018 Payment Fraud Trends: Where Does Your Organization Fit In?

For the third consecutive year, Strategic Treasurer has partnered with Bottomline Technologies to produce a Treasury Fraud and Controls survey report that examines the payment fraud trends that are impacting the industry. This year’s survey involved feedback from more than 300 worldwide payments professionals spanning a wide range of roles, from CFO to treasury/cash manager.

It’s interesting and helpful to review this year-over-year data. It’s one thing to anecdotally experience the changes that are occurring in the fraud landscape, but it’s quite another to see actual data that illustrates the direction of change we’re experiencing.

Fraud has transformed incredibly over the past few years. Long gone are the days when criminals had to physically rob a bank in order to steal funds. Today’s fraud environment is much more sophisticated and advanced, with even check fraud now seeming quaint and old-timey. Fraud vectors such as business email compromise (BEC) and Ransomware are now the norm – threats that are difficult to prevent and that result in far larger losses than a bank robbery every could have caused.

That’s what makes the results of this year’s survey so interesting (and frightening). Strategic Treasurer summed it up this way:

“Despite increased awareness and spend, organizations have proven themselves largely unprepared for a more organized, strategic and persistent threat.”

So despite taking steps to protect themselves against fraud, they’re still under siege and in no position to defend against the pervasive attacks of today.  That’s a problem.

Here are some of the key findings from the report:

Additionally:

• 3% of firms that were hit with fraud had at least one attempt that came from a completely unknown source
• 84% of corporates have indicated that the threat of cyber and payments fraud has increased over the past year
• 37% of organizations still only have informal, or mostly informal, security controls in place

To find out how your organization stacks up you can download the full “2018 Treasury Fraud and Controls Survey Report,” along with complete analysis, here.