BHI Introduces Positive Pay

According to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), in 2021, financial institutions filed more than 350,000 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to report potential check fraud, a 23% increase over the number of filings in 2020.

The velocity of this nefarious activity nearly doubled the year after, with over 680,000 SARs filings in 2022.

With this trend on the rise, BHI wants to highlight a series of safety measures that our bank has in place to help our clients protect their assets and payments from bad actors.

Below is a Q&A with Nitin Aeri, the Head of Cash Management at BHI, who has spearheaded the development of Positive Pay, an enhanced service and solution that provides our clients with a more seamless ability to survey their accounts for questionable activities and secure them against fraud.

What is Positive Pay?

Positive Pay is a fraud mitigation tool from BHI that helps safeguard your company’s payments and debits by providing you with additional oversight and opportunities to verify transactions.

Positive Pay comes in two forms: Check Positive Pay and ACH Positive Pay.

What is Check Positive Pay?

Check Positive Pay is an easy and convenient tool that can bolster your company’s security against check fraud.

Check Positive Pay systematically cross-references the details between the checks cashed or deposited against your account versus the verified information that you provide to us at the time of issuing your check.

How Does Check Positive Pay Work?

Check Positive Pay enables you to upload your check register via the BHI Online Banking platform to provide us with insights— from the check number, date and dollar amount—into the checks you write so those details can be verified for accuracy when cashed or posted.

You can also enhance the service with Payee Positive Pay to include the payee name for verification.

When checks are presented for payment, we systemically compare this information to the check register uploaded to BHI Online Banking to ensure a match.

If the checks presented do not match, we will notify you of the exception items via email and the Online Banking platform, along with providing the presented check image. Using the check

information, you can review and decide whether you want the exception items to pay or return via Business Online.

For your security, all exception items without a decision will be returned once the decision period ends to ensure you are protected from fraudulent items posting.

What is ACH Positive Pay?

ACH Positive Pay enables you to manage and monitor the ACH debits posting to your account to stay vigilant against suspicious activity.

How does ACH Positive Pay work?

ACH Positive Pay is a custom filter and block system that gives you the power to authorize ACH debit transactions. You can establish rules for known vendors and set limits so that transactions presented for payment are inspected and any exceptions are brought to your attention for review and approval.

BHI will provide you with email alerts to inform you and your users of ACH activity affecting your account. You can log in through BHI Online Banking to view exceptions and make pay or return decisions.

For your security, if you don’t make a decision within the required deadline, the transaction will be returned to you automatically.

Why use Positive Pay?

Both Check Positive Pay and ACH Positive Pay provide you with an added layer of security and oversight to guard your account against fraudulent activities.

The Check Positive Pay service can be an effective tool to halt fraudulent activities in real-time rather than relying on the chance you’ll discover the activity (and file to recover the funds) on your own time.

Similarly, the ACH Positive Pay service will help you limit unauthorized access to your account by reviewing all incoming debits before they’re posted and cross-referencing them against the filters you’ve established to indicate which accounts have approval to make a debited withdrawal.

This process provides you with the capabilities to review and approve appropriate withdrawals or review and call back any debited amounts that seem amiss during the recall period.

Across both products, Positive Pay provides you with an easy and convenient layer of oversight to help secure your company’s finances against fraud.