Even the most sophisticated organizations can have their ambitions thwarted by payments fraud. Protection and prevention are the keys to ensuring that your company does not become a target. Organizations like yours turn to BMO Capital Markets for answers every day. Our fraud prevention solutions complement your own internal efforts, so you can focus on achieving your goals.

Positive Pay Services
Account Block Services
Migration to Electronic Payments
Internal Controls

With Positive Pay, we match the MICR line of checks presented for payment against your company’s check issue file and inform you of exceptions. For additional security, you can add Positive Payee, which compares the payee line of the presented check image against the payee data in your company’s issue file and reports a combination of payee name and standard positive pay exceptions. Reverse Positive Pay lets you match a bank check presentment file against your issue file and inform us of any items you want returned. For added convenience, you can be notified by email when exception items are ready to be reviewed.

Our check block service prevents paper checks from being processed on non-check issuing accounts. Paper checks presented to a blocked account are immediately returned, while all other activity is processed without disruption. Our check block service is ideal for lockbox depository accounts, concentration accounts, and special purpose or settlement accounts.

ACH debit blocks and filters can also help secure your accounts. Depending on your individual requirements, there are three options available to prevent unauthorized ACH debits:

• Allowing specific ACH debits to post while rejecting all others
• Blocking all ACH debits to your accounts
• Blocking all ACH debits above a maximum dollar amount

By eliminating the use of paper items in the value chain and replacing them with electronic payments such as ACH, wire payments, or EDI transactions, you reduce the potential for lost, altered or stolen checks. DirectLine®, our web-based treasury management portal, enhances your fraud protection efforts by bringing you front-end best practices around payment initiation, such as access, session and user management, as well as multifactor authentication and comprehensive audit reports. If your company does issue checks, DirectLine lets you inquire on the status of your checks, view paid, outstanding and exception items, retrieve check images and make pay/no pay decisions in real-time via the web.

Because payments fraud can come from within your organization,, internal controls are crucial.

Best practices include:

• Reconciling accounts daily
• Segregating payment initiation and authorization duties as well as A/P and A/R functions
• Using only high-quality standard check stock with security features
• Securing check stock and paper originals of all electronically transmitted checks, changing stock periodically and destroying old stock
• Eliminating manual or rush checks and closely examining those that are issued
• Monitoring payment activity carefully and conducting surprise and scheduled audits
• Placing stop payments on checks not cashed in a timely manner