Unfortunately, fraud is continuously evolving, which means your business should too. It is essential that your business relies heavily on technology in order to win the battle against schemes.
Fraud seems to be at an all-time high, especially after the pandemic. A majority of attacks are coming from business email compromise (BEC) attacks, which generally appear in the form of invoice or payment fraud and can go easily unnoticed by businesses.
With this in mind, what measures can you take to prevent being deceived? The answer is a mix of people, processes, and technology. First, it is essential that staff are trained on fraud prevention and cyber-attacks. However, scammers are getting smarter and smarter which is making it more difficult for the most trained individuals to detect fraud. This is why we also rely on processes and technology. Processes can help mitigate fraud, but we must use all three together in order to have a strong defense against those sophisticated fraudsters.
When it comes to technology, your best defense is having a good offense. Your accounts payable department is generally the first to identify and prevent fraudulent activity, so it should be their responsibility to flag potential issues with payments and invoices. For your business to evolve, your AP staff should have access to intelligent AP automation. This helps eliminate error-prone manual work, establishes standards for workflows, which can help increase compliance for your business.
There are multiple intelligent AP automation technologies that work together in order to help protect your organization from fraud. Here is a list of a few of the those availab:
AP automation solutions (APA): This helps automate invoice processing, which saves you time and eliminates errors.
Process orchestration: Helps maintain a trail of handoffs between human and digital workers.
Artificial intelligence: This determines the invoice layout and can help identify the correct information that is required.
Multi-channel invoice capture: This technology can automate the process no matter how you are provided invoices (i.e. XML, PDF, or paper).
Workflow and imaging solutions: This helps provide an option to electronically archive invoices and other important financial documents.
Automated supplier onboarding: This option will allow you to validate addresses, tax data and other critical information.
Intelligence within the Kofax solution set: This technology can identify what information to take from an invoice and whether pay slips have been altered.
You need to ensure your business is protected and that you are properly armed to fight against fraud. By investing in automation, you will be able to eliminate errors that are associated with manual invoicing, be able to spot fake invoices coming from unknown sources, save AP staffs’ valuable time by eliminating manual processes, and improve productivity due to better workflows. From forgeries to complicated cyber threats, your business will be protected thanks to intelligent automation.
