Overview

A global company with $100 billion in revenue and a vast network of vendors faced severe fraud challenges, caused by compromised email credentials and outdated manual processes.  To address these vulnerabilities, the company collaborated with apexanalytix to introduce automated security measures. Key solutions included our supplier-facing portal for onboarding and our robust bank account validations across multiple countries. These helped eliminate manual processes, significantly improve fraud detection, and resulted in zero incidents of payment fraud.

Challenge

A global company with $100B in revenue and tens of thousands of vendors is a ripe target for fraud attacks. Add in manual processes to stop the constant attempts and there are going to be some losses.

One supplier had their email credentials compromised and a fraudster requested a bank change to steal a $1.4M payment. Another payment of $14M was almost paid to a fraudulent bank account, but eventually stopped.

The old, manual controls just weren’t working anymore. Staff was spending a lot of time checking and double-checking suspicious requests. But fraudsters were getting more creative – and getting through the controls. The company needed a better approach.

Solution

The organization began layering security controls within their procure-to-pay processes by removing the manual process of onboarding suppliers through email exchanges. By deploying apexanalytix’s supplier-facing Portal, the suppliers would input the required info in the online portal and all data like Tax ID, bank account, prohibited list screening and more could be automatically validated.

By partnering with apexanalytix, the organization was able to include bank account ownership validation in the US and several other countries that the company’s suppliers operated in. Bank account validation allowed the company to remove a very manual process of calling suppliers to validate bank account information with an automated, secure bank account validation.

apexanalytix’s bank account validation connects directly with a trusted authority like a banking consortium or government agency to positively confirm bank account ownership. This automated, real-time bank account ownersip validatiob works across the US, UK, Sweden (GIRO), Poland, India and the Czech Republic.

The process verifies multiple aspects of that bank account to confirm that it is legitimately owned by the supplier:

• Legal entity match on supplier’s profile and bank account
• Bank account type (commercial, individual)
• Good standing of the bank account
• Date the account was opened

Now, every supplier bank account change goes through their supplier management portal with established controls in place to protect the organization from sophisticated social engineering, phishing and imposter schemes.

Results

• Zero incidents of payment fraud since implementing automated bank account validation
• $14M in a single incident of payment fraud prevented
• Four more different fraud attempts thwarted
• Tens of thousands of vendor records are kept accurate, complete and monitored for potential fraud
• Fraud and risk checks performed as part of vendor setup instead of after the fact
• FTE time savings by moving bank account change responsibility from individual companies to a central, automated control within procure-to-pay
• Executive promotion for the leader of the initiatives to get fraud to zero