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PaymentWorks Wants to Keep Every B2B Payment Secure and Trust Between Parties High

PaymentWorks protects against B2B payments fraud, ensures regulatory compliance, and automates vendor management processes so every company can be 100% certain about every third-party they do business with.

What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

According to the AFP, 74% of companies reported they were the target of an attempted or successful payments fraud attack in 2020. More than three quarters of the time, these attacks stemmed from business or vendor email compromise as fraudsters pretended to be someone else – often an existing vendor – in the hopes of changing vendor bank account credentials.        

Cybersecurity can help, but it cannot remove the risk of falling victim to this type of social engineering scam. 

Professionals in AP, Procurement and Treasury live with a lot of stress about this. To alleviate the massive burden on these departments, PaymentWorks is offering what no one else in the industry can – a B2B payments security guarantee.         Vendors onboard through our platform, and if we give the thumbs up that a bank account is okay to pay, and we’re wrong, that is a PaymentWorks problem.  Our customers can go back to sleeping at night.  Plus, they get compliance and added cost avoidance associated with vendor management to boot.

How Are You Solving That Problem?

While there are ample supplier portals and vendor management tools out there, none were solving the problem of verifying the information the vendor has submitted.  We partner with third party vendors to verify tax ID’s, to validate mailing addresses and to continuously monitor sanctions lists.  We also do a combination of a third-party partner and our own proprietary algorithm and process to assess the risk association with each submitted bank account.

What this means in practical terms is that our customers can see – at a glance- if the submitted information is accurate and trustworthy.  They no longer need to hold their breath when they make a payment, or worry about B notice violations come end of year or find out they paid a debarred vendor after the fact.  The security we provide is that our customers can trust the identity of the vendor they are about to pay.

How Has the Pandemic Impacted Your Company?

Our value proposition, which we already think is valuable, increased dramatically when procurement and AP staff started working at home.  When 99% of all companies are onboarding vendors through intensively manual processes, those processes break completely when everyone is working from home.  The need for automated, digital onboarding became immediately apparent. 

Where Do You See Your Company Going in 5 Years?

The ability to effectively do business relies on the trust between the parties doing business. Right now, there is far too much risk companies need to deal with, where they need to either accept that risk, or devote expensive resources as part of the cost of doing business. Companies are constantly bombarded by ever increasing attacks by hackers, fraudsters, and even unscrupulous suppliers. We foresee a world where this risk is effectively eliminated, and every company will have 100% identity certainty about every third-party they pay or do business with. By having this level of trust, companies can focus on their business, and spend less time protecting themselves from those that would have them do otherwise.  We are going to make that happen.

What Is the Next Big Challenge in Information Security?

As every security professional knows, the weakest link in your security posture is the human element. You can put in all the right security controls, but if those controls are overridden by a human making a spur of the moment bad decision, or a decision based on limited information, your security controls mean nothing. 

Unfortunately, there are still too many critical manual business processes that rely on people making good decisions, people who are simply told to be more vigilant. And the problem is compounded by the fact that these manual processes are not just at your own company, but at those organizations you pay for services or products -payments that might end up in the wrong hands.

The challenge is to automate wherever possible and where not possible, to give people 100% trust in the information they’re using to make decisions.

Alan Greenblatt, CTO and co-founder, PaymentWorks

How Do People Get Involved/Buy Into Your Vision?

Folks should reach out to us at [email protected] (and mention Threat.Technology!) and we can give them a walk through.  We even have a handy cost/benefit calculator to help folks to put real numbers to what having PaymentWorks can provide.

Sure, there is the risk transfer of a potential fraud event, but we also help with cost avoidance by controlling maverick spend, converting checks to ACH and we save so much time that many of our customers have been able to re-direct staff to higher value projects with the time they have saved.  It feels really good to be building a tool that can positively impact the quality of the work people do each day.

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