Understanding and handling payment issues

[Adam Fleming]

A financial organization, or an organization involved in any business for that matter, faces the prospect of receiving duplicate, fraudulent or late payments. These are the typical payment issues an organization is likely to face at some point of time in its business.

Payment issues are something almost no organization is likely to be free from. Duplicate invoice payments, just one of the payment issues an organization is likely to face, account for losses of something like $100 million over a three-year period just for medium sized organizations. The amount is likely to be several times higher for large companies and those in the public sector, which most likely deal with billions of dollars in transactions.

Payment issues have their implications

The consequence of payment issues, be they duplicate, fraudulent or late payments, is whopping. It is likely to lead to business losses, because late payments, for instance, hinder investment into other productive activities by businesses. Although there are a number of sources at which payment issues can happen; it usually takes an organization quite a while to detect any payment issue, which could be duplicate, fraudulent or late payments. It also takes herculean efforts at times to get to the bottom of the payment issues.

Payment issues can happen due to a number of reasons

There is any number of reasons for which payment issues could arise. Manual data entry and processing, possible overlooking of characters while entering Accounts Payable (AP) or by Automated Clearinghouses (ACH) processors, oversights by manual checks and overlapping or duplication of payments while making payments from varied sources are just some of the reasons for which payment issues can occur with businesses.

Although the Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) Act has put in a number of checks and balances into the payment aspect of corporations; there are still a good number of loopholes that need to be e plugged if payment issues have to be addressed. How do organizations, especially those in finance, mitigate payment issues? What steps do they need to take to understand the regulations set out by the SOX Act, or take their own measures to prevent payment issues arising out of duplicate, fraudulent or late payments?

Learn the aspects of payment issues at a learning session

All these will be addressed at a very valuable learning session on this topic. The webinar, being organized by Compliance4All, a leading provider of professional trainings for all the areas of regulatory compliance, will have Ray Graber as speaker.

Ray is a senior BFSI professional who brings a deep and thorough understanding of banking, technology, and finance. To hear from him on how to understand and address payment issues such as duplicate, fraudulent or late payments; just register for this webinar by logging on to http://www.compliance4all.com/control/w_product/~product_id=501138?...

Insights for understanding payment issues

At this webinar, Ray will help participants understand how to foresee payments issues and strategize solutions. He will offer suggestions about how to put risk management plans in place to do this. The suggestions Ray will offer at this webinar will help participants from banks and corporations to get a clearer understanding of each other’s concerns and constraints, and ways of addressing them.

This session will arm them with the tools necessary for accurately auditing their existent processes and limit the potential for fraud. He will teach them how to understand the settlement process, which is part of the banking business. In other words, attending this session will equip participants with the insight needed for understanding payment issues and tackle them in relation to duplicate, fraudulent or late payments.

At this session, Ray will cover the following areas:

o  Payment System Risk Policy

o  FFIEC Action Summary for Retail Payments

o  Areas of Risk

o  Risk Assessment Activities

o  People, Processes, and Products

o  Is there an optimal organizational structure/for managing payments strategy?

o  Are there best practices that apply to my institution?

o  What are the hurdles in establishing an organization focused on the payments business?

o  Are there common pitfalls?

http://www.infor.com/content/whitepapers/detecting-prev-dup-invoice...