In today’s fast-paced business world, fraud prevention is more critical than ever, and one powerful tool that can protect your business is Positive Pay. With check fraud on the rise, all businesses need an effective way to ensure that only legitimate transactions are processed. Positive Pay acts as your business’ fulltime digital watchdog, validating every check before it’s cashed.

The Benefits of Positive Pay for Businesses
Positive Pay is a secure and efficient method that helps businesses prevent check fraud and manage their financial transactions more effectively. How it works is business owners provide a list of issued checks to the bank to watch out for. This will ensure that only legitimate checks are processed. Here are some key benefits of Positive Pay for businesses:

1. Fraud Prevention: Positive Pay is a strong defense against check fraud. It requires businesses to submit a file with details of issued checks, such as the check number, amount, and payee. The bank matches these details with the checks presented for payment, flagging any discrepancies and preventing unauthorized transactions.
2. Improved Cash Flow Management: Businesses gain greater control over outgoing payments. Since every check is validated before being cleared, companies can monitor and manage their cash flow more accurately, ensuring funds are available for legitimate transactions.
3.  Reduced Risk of Errors: Human error is minimized by automatically verifying checks against a list of authorized transactions. This reduces the chances of mistakes that could lead to financial loss or issues with vendors and customers.
4. Streamlined Operations: Automating the check verification process frees up time for accounting teams to focus on other important tasks. Positive Pay systems are typically integrated with accounting software, making reconciliation faster and more efficient.

Positive Pay In Action
In addition, to sharing all the benefits, we want to show you three real life examples of how Positive Pay helped save our customers thousands of dollars in losses.

1. A forged check was caught, saving the customer $9,697. After receiving a call from their vendor stating payments were not received, the customer was concerned. Our team advised them to remove that specific check from their positive pay list in order for it to be flagged in the event it was presented to be cashed or deposited. Within 48 hours, the check was presented on the account. Thanks to Positive Pay, the customer was able to review the check and notice that it was altered. They flagged it as forgery and returned the check.
2. Altered checks that had been stolen in the mail were detected, saving the customer over $69,000. A customer had reason to believe that outgoing mail, including checks, had been stolen. They were able to review Positive Pay, which stopped two altered checks from clearing the account.
3. Endorsement forgery was noticed, saving the customer over $900. A Cornerstone Bank Operations Specialist noticed that a check coming through Positive Pay had a different endorsement format than usual. After reaching out the customer we learned the endorsement was forged and the check was not processed.

Just as Positive Pay has protected these three business, it can do the same for yours. If you want to protect your bottom line and streamline your operations, please reach out to your banker today or email cm@cornerstone.bank. For more information and to see this tool in action check out our informational video here.