Business owners may associate their bank with making loans and taking deposits, but as payments fraud looms, bankers are meeting the need with sophisticated cash management and fraud prevention tools.

Despite (or maybe because of) all the innovation that’s happened in the payments space in recent years, checks are still the most popular payment method targeted by fraudsters.

According to the Association of Financial Professionals’ 2016 Payments Fraud and Control Survey, 71 percent of companies experienced actual or attempted check fraud in 2015, and 42 percent of respondents said that fraud attempts had increased over the prior year. Wire transfers were the second-most popular target, and almost half of respondents said they’d experienced an attack via wire transfer.

It makes sense then that a business might look to its banker for help with fraud protection.

“I think the hottest thing that we’re seeing out there in the fraud prevention arena is a product called Positive Pay,” said Mark Rosenbloom, manager of cash management services at First County Bank in Stamford.

Positive Pay allows a bank’s business customers to enter in the checks and ACH transactions they’ve authorized so the bank knows exactly which transactions have been cleared by their client.

But Positive Pay is not a “set it and forget it” kind of solution. First County Bank and other community banks that offer Positive Pay to business customers, including Ion Bank in Naugatuck and Chelsea Groton Bank in Norwich, said it still requires the human touch – especially in teaching your customers how to use it successfully.

“Positive Pay is becoming very, very important, especially with all the fraud here, but that unto itself has a lot of information that somebody needs to know in how to discuss it and how to support it,” said Bill Lidestri, Chelsea Groton’s senior vice president of operations and technology. “When they have a problem uploading an ACH file at 4:00 in the afternoon, they need to talk to somebody and they need to get somebody knowledgeable on the phone right now.”

In addition to Positive Pay, some banks have also begun offering their business clients security tokens, a small electronic device, not unlike a key fob, that displays a series of ever-changing numbers along with a personal identification number.

Megan Charette, assistant vice president of business development and cash management at Ion Bank, said the bank plans to pilot a soft token approach, which offers customers that tokenization by way of a smartphone app.

And as all businesses seek to do more with less, they’re seeking out solutions to save that most precious commodity of all: time. For some, this might mean remote deposit capture that helps save a trip to the bank. For others, it might mean lockbox services.

Charette noted an uptick in business customers seeking out lockbox services from their bank. If you’ve ever mailed a check payment off to a post office box, then you’ve done business with a lockbox service, which basically handles the payments made to a business via snail mail.

“Especially for municipalities for tax collections, condo associations, hospitals, places like that that do a lot of billing, it’s a great solution for them,” Charette said. “It saves them a lot of time.”

The Human Touch

But the more things change, the more they stay the same, and as bankers launch more high-tech solutions to meet their business clients’ needs, they’re also investing more into their main resource: their people.

Bankers can share the latest scoop on common scams with their business clients and tip them off to a fraud that may be coming their way. Business email compromise in particular was on the uptick last year, with 64 percent of respondents in the AFP survey reporting that their organization was targeted. This type of scam involves more legwork, as criminals gather personal and confidential business data in order to fool their marks into wiring money to the scammers.

Those human conversations are becoming both an important part of the onboarding process for new customers, as well as a part of the regular conversations bankers have with their clients. At the end of the day, good business banking means cutting through the noise and reaching your customers with the latest news they can use, said Sara Tucker, First County Bank’s director of business banking.

“This is becoming pretty commonplace news, so this is an easy conversation to bring up,” Tucker said. “You sometimes get that deer in the headlights kind of stare where they realize they’re not doing much in that arena, so that’s where [we] can come in with the education piece.”