5 Ways to Assess How Vulnerable You Are to B2B Payments Fraud

Organizations face numerous threats concerning B2B payments processing as bad actors look for ways to alter banking information and redirect B2B payments into the wrong account. Accurate assessment of B2B payments fraud vulnerability is essential for strategic fraud defense planning.

The “FinTech Risk Management Playbook,” a PYMNTS and nsKnox collaboration, outlined five questions to ask when assessing a business’s B2B payments fraud vulnerability as well as three key areas in which firms often miss B2B payments fraud risks and how to mitigate data breaches and payments fraud.

Get the report: FinTech Risk Management Playbook

Mitigating Data Breaches, Payments Fraud

One key area is verifying credentials at onboarding or when updating banking details. Organizations should implement best-practice processes and technology to ensure payment details are verified when onboarding new payees and processing requests to update banking details.

Businesses should also protect data at rest, which includes all business-critical, financial and vendor or customer information stored digitally on servers or in the cloud. For example, businesses should look to implement multifactor authentication (MFA), define devices and data storage policies and enable user access to be granted or revoked.

A third key area is protecting payment transactions. Most businesses have taken some measures to establish controls against payments fraud. Transitioning to digital payments and automating accounts payable (AP) are two solutions that can help mitigate B2B payments fraud.

Assessing a Business’s Vulnerability

To assess a business’s B2B payments fraud vulnerability, the report suggested asking five questions:

• What are the primary B2B payments fraud risks and vulnerabilities facing your business?
• How vulnerable are your systems to internal and external attacks, whether by hackers, insiders or remote employees?
• How can your finance and IT departments quantify these risks? What do they mean to your business?
• How can your finance and IT department best respond to risks? What controls, policies and procedures can your firm implement to mitigate payments fraud?
• How can your finance, IT and security teams work together to monitor, review, report and prevent internal and external payments fraud risk?

Together with this model for protecting corporate payments, there’s also a need for collaboration between finance, IT and security teams, nxKnox Chief Technology Officer Allen Shiber told PYMNTS in a January interview.

Read more: Protecting Corporate Payments Requires Collaboration on Multiple Fronts

When they work well together, they can take an end-to-end view of problems and solutions and prevent things from falling through the cracks.

“If IT guys understand the financial process, then they can identify problems that finance guys are not aware of — and vice versa,” Shiber said.

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