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Member question: “What does your company do to verify payment instructions for new vendors and changes in instructions for an existing vendor?”
Peer answer 1: “Our organization spends a significant amount of time validating changing or new banking information via phone calls. We are in the process of rolling out a service offered through a banking partner that will allow us to do this through an application they offer, but the database they use will not include every vendor.
- “The bank we are using is U.S. Bank. They provide us an interface through their SinglePoint system to perform validations of banking information. My understanding is they use a system that all banks can have access to called Early Warning.
- “This is a database that was created by a number of banks pooling banking information together to allow for validation and other inquiries. Another group we looked at was GIACT.
- “We decided to use U.S. Bank because we already had a relationship with them and had access to their SinglePoint system. It was also more cost effective for us.”
Peer answer 2: “Accounts payable performs a vendor callback prior to setting up the vendor’s banking information in the ERP. Payment requests to treasury that flow outside of the ERP must be accompanied by proof of a vendor callback from the requestor. There are some exclusions to this policy.”
Peer answer 3: “We do verification calls to talk to a different person than the one that sent the wiring instructions. Exceptionally, if this is not possible due to time zone differences, language barriers, etc., we send a penny test and ask them to confirm the amount and send a screenshot from the vendor bank account statement.”
Peer answer 4: “We also do verification calls to a known contact at the vendor before setting electronic funds transfer instructions as well as before changing payment instructions. In addition, we utilize GIACT’s account validation services.”
