7 eftsure features to improve payment controls

1. Online bank extension to avoid making fraudulent payments

At its core, eftsure helps protect your organisation against financial fraud by matching business names with bank account numbers. Something financial institutions don’t do. The banks’ inability to verify account names with account numbers paves the way for criminals to defraud organisations through a range of cyber attacks including Business Email Compromise (BEC), Vendor Email Compromise (VEC), hacking into ERP systems, or manipulating data in Vendor Master Files and ABA payment files that are used to upload payment data to online banking portals.

Our multiple-factor verification solution closes the security gap by providing a database of over 2 million Australian businesses with verified bank account names and numbers. This data is used to protect payments at the point of payment using simple thumbs-up and thumbs-down warning alerts.

The overlaying browser extension checks whether the payments you are about to make are correct and within the expected range. On average we alert 600 (red thumbs) times per month. Signalling potential fraud or errors. The extension plays a key role in the fraud prevention strategy of many of our customer and has helped a large Australian engineering firm prevent a $1 million fraud attempt.

2. Initial vendor data cleanse to improve data accuracy

In order to protect your payments, we’ve built a system that cleans all of your existing data (necessary because most Australian businesses vendor data already has 25% anomalies in it) securely. It also allows you to see your vendor data accuracy in one clear overview. So in addition to protecting you from fraud, eftsure saves you time to verify data and keep data up-to-date. Starting off with clean vendor data reduces risks, but also saves your AP team valuable time conducting last-minute call-back controls when payments are due.

3. User management to streamline best practice controls

As mentioned before controls relying on people, will eventually fail. Even the most trusted professionals only have to make a mistake once. To sufficiently protect your payments against digital threats, you need a digital response. Our web interface allows you to automate many of the human-centric, manual procedures your AP team currently undertakes. Embracing technology removes much of the friction in existing payment controls while remaining the highest security standards. It helps ensure your organisation achieves a more effective and robust approach to mitigating fraud and preventing human error. We asked KPMG to conduct a time-work study, exploring efficiencies for your AP team.  Their study revealed that we save a business 29 minutes every time they add or change a supplier, and 59 seconds each time they check a single payment. When making a large number of payments to a large number of suppliers those time savings become very significant while not compromising on security.

One way on how we provide efficiencies are the user roles and permissions for your AP team. By providing an interface that manages segregation of duty and logs all payment reviews and data change request, our solution avoids confusion and many  “he said / she said” situations.

4. Supplier onboarding invitations to securely collect new vendor data

With customisable digital supplier onboarding forms, eftsure allows you to collect any information you require from your supplier’s. Instead of emailing documents back and forth, provide your suppliers with an easy to use portal where they can submit documents or any other information you might require.

5. Real-time vendor management portal to maintain data accuracy

All information is securely stored against supplier records and will never be stored in your employee’s email inboxes. There have been several BEC hacks where criminals were able to obtain sensitive information from suppliers because these documents were never deleted from the email inboxes. In 2020, that is exactly what happened to Services NSW. Their employees had sensitive documents from over 500,000 individuals stored in their email inboxes. The criminals were able to simply download all emails that were sent and received during the tenure of the employees, causing one of Australia’s largest data leaks in history. By using a portal to securely store these document you avoid your supplier’s data being compromised via compromised email inboxes.

Additionally, to maintaining secure and fraud-free relationships with your suppliers, the portal also lends itself to:

• Update email settings to make sure you’re entire team knows who to contact at a supplier.
• Set payment limits for suppliers to avoid paying the wrong amount. When approving payments in your online banking environment we’ll alert you about out of range payments.
• Log notes to keep track of interactions with suppliers.
• Bank account details change requests. One of the events where you are most vulnerable to push payment frauds is when suppliers request to change their bank account details. With eftsure you can change these details in a secure manner.

6. Document storage to remain compliant

eftsure helps your organisation meet growing regulatory and compliance obligations, including:

• Real-time tax and ABN alerts Make sure suppliers’ ABN and GST registrations are valid.
• Supply chain monitoring Secure your supply chain with customised forms that enable you to capture essential supplier information efficiently and securely.
• Real-time credit scoring Keep abreast of your suppliers’ creditworthiness by obtaining real-time credit scores from CreditorWatch.
• Visibility over licences and insurance Collect suppliers’ certificates of currency and receive notifications when they expire.
• Taxable Payments Reporting System
• Modern Slavery Act
• Payment Times Reporting Act

7. Audit logs, to track who did what

THe audit logs record every event that’s being performed on the platform. Every payment review, supplier onboarding, bank account change request can all be traced to the single user who was responsible for the event. All this data is readily available to your auditors, which means you no longer have to scramble for documents when audits are due.

Easy to implement

eftsure works with all major banks and doesn’t change any of your workflow within your ERP system. Getting our solution installed and up and running takes only a few hours of your time. We usually need around 2 hours to train your team on how to use the platform to its full potential. While that is happening, we need a few days to sync your supplier data with our database of existing suppliers to make sure all supplier data is “clean and green”.

If you are interested in learning more about eftsure check out our about eftsure video. Please request a product demo with our team, we’ll discuss how eftsure will prevent your business falling victim to financial fraud and cybercrime.