CPA_Practice_Advisor_June_2020 - 23

Adjust Their Payment
Coronavirus
By Josh Cyphers and Derek Halpern

to accept payment by credit card.
Virtual
cards--sometimes
known as single-use ghost accounts
or SUGAs--are not as well-known
as they should be in finance and
accounting circles. Still, they can be
an incredibly valuable part of your
payment strategy. Unlike P-cards or
company-issued credit cards, virtual
cards exist to pay suppliers easily.
Each card has a unique number that
can only be used by the assigned
recipient in the designated amount.
That provides AP with substantial
control and makes it one of the
most secure, fraud-proof payment
methods. You also should expect to
receive rebates to offset some of your
AP costs.
The main challenges are enablement and outreach, which don't
require significant effort on the part
of AP teams since virtual card payment and remittance are relatively
straightforward for suppliers. All
that's left is to structure your rebate
program to support your team's
efforts and then some.

ACH FOR MOST
If a supplier declines to accept card,

which often happens due to the
interchange fee, your second request
should be to enable them for ACH.
Most vendors will say yes to this; in
fact, they'd prefer it to check. Just be
sure you have a realistic appreciation
of the true ACH payment operating
costs, including enablement and
data management, as well as fraud
support.

CHECK FOR HOLDOUTS
While the number is dwindling, there
are some suppliers with a ride-or-die
mentality who won't accept anything
but checks. For these suppliers, an
outsourced payment provider can do
a print check from an electronic file,
so your team doesn't have to handle
all the paper.
Your payment strategy should
include automating the payment
workflow. Fintech ePayment providers wrap these disparate workflows
into one interface so that all AP has
to do is click "pay." Then their payments will issue to their suppliers in
the method they elected to receive.
Because these platforms are in the
cloud, payments can be approved
and scheduled remotely, with vis-

ibility for multiple team members.

HEIGHTENED FRAUD
PROTECTION
Your payment strategy should also
include fraud protection. The pandemic, the move to remote work,
and challenging economic conditions
have created a perfect storm for a
rise in all types of crime, including
payment fraud. It's essential to have
strong internal controls, especially
now that sensitive information is
residing in your teams' homes and
on their personal networks. Preventing theft is a key component of cash
management.
It used to be that organizations
mainly worried about check fraud,
and that's still a problem, but it's
reduced quite a bit thanks to controls such as Positive Pay, Positive
Payee, and watermarks on checks.
So far, there aren't similar controls
for ACH. As businesses have gravitated towards ACH solutions, such
payments have become more of a
target for fraudsters. That's a problem because the funds move faster,
making it much harder to recover a
fraudulent ACH.
Business Email Compromise
(BEC) schemes are the most common type of attack. These involve
fraudsters masquerading as suppliers, company executives, or other
high-ranking personnel, requesting
that funds route to a new, fraudulent
bank account. We're already seeing
that the pandemic has provided
BEC scammers with new material
to convince an overwhelmed AP to
comply with these requests.
To protect your team, you need
a partner who can support your
enablement and fraud protection

JUNE 2020 ■

goals, so your team can stay focused
on cash management.
Finance and AP have long
intended to go electronic, but the
transition has been slow. It's not
just the flip of a switch or the sudden addition of a new payment
type. Very few businesses realize
how strategic the shift is until after
they've committed to an update.
Many companies that don't plan
accordingly have had to revert to
check payments when they realized
the actual cost and effort it takes
to switch suppliers over. Rather
than trying to attack a single pain
point, you have to address the whole
process from top to bottom.
Now we are going to see an
acceleration of this shift with the
remote workforce and challenging
economic conditions. There is a new
imperative, and there is also new
technology. Interestingly enough,
a lot of the fintechs providing B2B
payments technology got their start
during the great recession, when the
financial system collapsed, and cloud
technology was being born. These
are now mature companies, ready
to "cross the chasm" and transition
their partners to 100 percent electronic payments. ■
Derek Halpern is the SVP of Sales for
Nvoicepay. He has over 20 years of
technology sales and leadership experience, including 16 years in the fintech
and payments space. Josh Cyphers is the
Vice President of Product & Strategy for
Nvoicepay. For the past 20 years, Josh has
managed successful growth for a variety
of companies, from start-ups to Fortune
100 companies.

www.CPAPracticeAdvisor.com

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