How to Assure Payments Efficiency AND Compliance
Companies face two significant challenges when it comes to payment transactions: First, payments should be handled efficiently, meaning direct costs such as transaction fees and indirect costs such as personnel or IT expenses should be scaled back as much as possible. Second, payments should be handled securely to assure compliance. Commonly, payment management projects are only considered successful if they meet both of these challenges.
In order to make payments more cost-effective and secure, treasurers usually aim to process all transactions centrally through a fully-automated and documented process. Here are two examples showing how technology enables treasurers to achieve efficiency and compliance at the same time:
1. Bank Account Screening: Leveraging treasury technology, payment execution can be monitored based on the information in bank account statements, which are automatically loaded into the treasury system from partner banks or via SWIFT. Using search rules to check account information for irregularities, potential fraudulent activities such as unauthorized cash withdrawals can be determined automatically. Furthermore, tolerance analyses help to identify gross differences in payment amounts.
2. Payment Factory: Treasurers might favor bank account screening for its simplicity. But as controls and corrective measures can only be set after the payments have been made, they should consider techniques preventing fraud upfront. Setting up of a payment factory offers an attractive, preventive solution. The high degree of centralization of the payment factory allows efficient processing and monitoring at the same time. In this case, potential fraud cases can be prevented through central user administration and embargo list checks. At the same time, workflow automation, payment method optimization and the introduction of on-behalf of payments assures cost-effectiveness.
Leveraging modern technology, compliance and efficiency form a perfect symbiosis in modern payment management .