With the scary stats on fraud coming out these days, naturally, we wanted to protect ourselves.

We adopted most of today’s best practices: frequent, unannounced audits, an anonymous employee hotline, daily account reconciliation and prompt review of exception reports.

We also moved to check positive pay and payee as well as ACH debit blocks and filters and double verifications for card-not-present transactions.

But it’s a cat-and-mouse game.

As soon as you plug one hole, crooks find new ones – especially as more finance info moves over the Net.

Next came new emerging solutions: enhanced info sharing within and across industries, cross-payment positive pay to integrate solutions across multiple payment methods, and new pattern detection software to monitor transactions in real time.

We got some push back. These solutions can be expensive, and there were privacy and competitive considerations. But we had to put data security first.

We haven’t yet been able to do all we’d like, but we keep at it.

Perhaps the best argument is our reputation: We want to be known to our partners for best business practices.

(Brad Larson, VP & Treasurer, Pamida Stores, Omaha, NE)

Tags: ACH, detection software, fraud, security, technology