27-10-2021 | treasuryXL | Kyriba |

Payment errors and compliance violations cause significant losses for businesses of all sizes. Fraud alone cost companies more than $42 billion last year, according to PwC’s Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey.

The repercussions are wide-ranging, from arduous public disclosures and legal fees to reputational damage. Some are the result of attacks by elite cybercriminals, while others are simple mistakes made by careless or inexperienced employees. Kyriba’s Payments Fraud Solution delivers confidence that payment fraud attempts, errors and policy violations are captured, identified, and eliminated, saving your organization time, effort, and money.

Have a read of Kyriba’s Fact Sheet to learn more about payment errors and how Kyriba can help you.

20-09-2021 | treasuryXL | Kyriba |

To say that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way treasury departments and companies operate is a massive understatement. Treasury, a function already accustomed to ‘doing more with less,’ began operating remotely—often with a skeleton crew as companies were forced to reduce headcount.

Once mass distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine began, companies quickly began to strategise over what their post-pandemic workforce might look like. While the rise of the Delta variant has thrown a wrench into many organisations’ plans to reopen, eventually, that new work model will take shape. And it might look drastically different than what has come before.

Here are a few things to consider.

A hybrid work environment will very likely be the new normal.

Research from Harvard Business Review found that 70 percent of companies—including giants like Google, Citi and HSBC—are moving to a hybrid model. Just as treasury teams needed to adapt quickly to operating from home, now they’ll have to adjust to having some team members in the office while others are remote.

CFOs have an eye on emerging technologies.

The remote working environment brought on by the pandemic prompted, or perhaps forced, many organisations to digitise their processes. In a hybrid work environment (that could revert back to a fully remote one if COVID-19 variants continue to emerge), finance chiefs will continue to call for better technological solutions. New research from Gartner found that 82 percent of CFOs plan to increase investments in digital capabilities. CFOs named artificial intelligence (AI) as the technology that they expect to have the most impact over the next three years. Kyriba users can apply AI and machine learning (ML) to key cash management tasks like reconciling prior day bank files with their expected cash positions. For organisations that process high volumes of transactions, handling this process manually can take hours. Kyriba’s solution can identify and resolve discrepancies in minutes, and it learns from the data so that eventually, little to no human interaction is required.

Treasury’s role expanded considerably throughout the COVID-19 crisis. 

More than 80 percent of treasury professionals said that greater value was assigned to treasury during the pandemic, according to the 2020 AFP Strategic Role of Treasury Survey. Furthermore, nearly 70 percent of respondents believe that treasury’s role will continue to be of greater significance. To maintain that influence over other, other departments, treasury professionals may need to revisit their soft skills. Just as employees may have faced difficulty giving presentations over Zoom, they may also find presenting in-person or to a mix of in-person and remote employees to be equally challenging.

Regional treasury centers might no longer need to be regional. 

While it can be convenient to house a treasury center to manage cash and FX hedging in a region with unique regulations, the COVID-19 pandemic may prompt organisations to rethink that approach. Since the onset of the pandemic, those remote working has surged; the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research found that 42 percent of the U.S. labor force currently works from home. And perhaps more importantly, it’s been incredibly successful for both employers and workers, according to PwC’s U.S. Remote Work Survey. Ultimately, this could mean that treasury teams may no longer see a need to centralise their operations regionally even after the pandemic ends.

Continuous remote work means fraud threats will remain elevated.

According to the 2021 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, business email compromise (BEC) scams increased last year. This was likely due to the remote work environment making it more difficult to verify emails with colleagues. Security will continue to be paramount for treasury, particularly if it moves to a permanent model where some employees regularly work from home. Treasury teams will need to continue to use strong controls like multifactor authentication, single sign-on and virtual private networks to ensure that only the appropriate people have access to their systems. Additionally, treasury employees must be even more meticulous about setting approvals for payments so that fraud attempts will be thwarted. With Kyriba Payment Fraud Detection, treasury can stop fraud in real-time. Users can set pre-defined detection rules, to screen for suspicious transactions. Additionally, ML algorithms can identify and quarantine dubious payments for further review.

The cloud provides a failsafe for business continuity planning (BCP). 

Cloud-based treasury management systems aren’t only efficient modules to help treasury teams track cash and liquidity. They are also a key cog in BCP. Cloud-based solutions like Kyriba’s are hosted offsite in multiple locations, allowing your treasury department to function regardless of whether your team is working in the office or from a dozen different locations. So even if a new COVID-19 variant emerges, treasury teams can continue to function without interruption.

Making a Game Plan

While it’s unclear how soon offices will begin opening back up en masse, now is the time for treasury teams to begin planning for the shift. When the pandemic first hit, treasury functions had to respond quickly, and they did as best they could. Pivoting in this next phase won’t be seamless, but with the right protocols and technology in place, treasury teams can make smooth transitions.

23-08-2021 | treasuryXL | Kyriba |

It seems like every day there is a new fraud headline. As a result, companies are learning that preventing fraud needs to be a responsibility of all employees in the organisation. To prevent fraud, an organisation needs to focus on education through training, standardized controls, and IT policies on top of a strong technology solution.

The threat of fraud has grown dramatically in recent years. In fact, according to the 2021 AFP Fraud and Control Study, overall, 74% of companies have experienced fraud or attempted fraud. Your organisation needs to be prepared and Treasury activities need to support identifying and preventing fraud. Recently, I had a conversation with a Treasurer who said, “if it’s (fraud) not on your mind in Treasury, you’ve already lost”. He went on to talk about how much more difficult it is to manage fraud when you have a decentralized Treasury team.

Best in class fraud prevention is about having a strong overall ecosystem, culture and technology – the fabric of an organisation. Fraud prevention must be top of mind for everyone in the company. Specific training should be included in introductory orientation as well as ongoing training and annual awareness campaigns. Individuals need to be able to identify potential phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) campaigns to ensure they don’t become victims.  It only takes one person to make a poor judgment call to allow access into a company’s system. It’s also important to consider cultural differences for offices in other parts of the world. Fraudsters are taking advantage of cultural norms. In some Asian countries it’s natural to defer to individuals with seniority. For example, receiving a message from the CFO to make a payment wouldn’t normally be questioned. Make sure that all individuals have a way to share, escalate and/or stop a transaction when there could be potential problems.

Standardised procedures are essential. With BEC, fraudsters assume that using the name and email of senior members of the management team, such as the CEO or CFO, will cause employees lower in the organisational hierarchy to do as instructed without question. To combat this, it is imperative that the procedures set up require strict adherence, and that senior management provides an environment where fewer senior members of the team are comfortable asking whether a payment is legitimate. If multiple ERP systems exist, ensure that consistent approval processes are in place across all systems. For smaller regional offices, set up procedures and approvals to ensure that separation of duties is in place and that you have visibility to the activities in remote offices. Some fraudsters like to target attacks on regional offices in hopes of bypassing some of the more stringent processes that are in place at headquarters.

Having an IT focus on fraud prevention and policies that support these efforts is also essential. IT should ensure that employees are password protected and that their passwords aren’t easily guessed. They should maintain strong firewalls and keep current on technology to identify potential hacker activity. In addition, it is helpful to randomly test employees with phishing emails to assist employees in recognizing fraudulent emails.

Finally, technology solutions to identify fraud are a critical component of fraud prevention. Solutions should include rules-based fraud detection that identifies multiple scenarios, for example situations where a vendor bank account number has changed. These transactions should be flagged and sent for validation. An individual should call the company using a phone number that is listed in the system of record. Or, the transaction should be sent for account verification allowing for confirmation that the bank account is owned by the organisation that is to be paid, and not some fraudulent entity. Account verification is a new tool that is being added to rules engines. It allows you to increase your confidence that the account is owned by the entity with which you have a relationship without having the time-consuming process of having to reach out to the entity directly to verify. The verification is quick and doesn’t slow down legitimate payments. Your fraud technology solution should also identify other fraud situations that you and a community of your peers have experienced or considered.

Machine learning to identify payment anomalies based on transaction history is also critical. It allows for patterns to be identified in the immense amounts of transactional data that your organisation has accumulated and then to match that in real-time to your specific transactions to identify potential fraud. This added layer of protection looks for behaviours that may not be identified by the human eye – timing of invoice receipt or change in the frequency of payment requests. The system continually adapts based on the information that it is tracking and provides suggestions when it identifies potentially fraudulent behavior.

Fraudsters continue to attack since they only need to find that one weak link on one day with a single person in your organisation. It’s up to you to make sure that the individuals in your company are prepared for the attack. Ensure that you have a training program that helps your employees identify potential fraud attempts. Define, monitor and enforce policies that support segregation of duties and consistent processes throughout the organisation. Confirm that your IT department is staying on top of technology that identifies and prevents hackers and supports best practices when establishing policies across the organisation. Last, but certainly not least, make sure that you are utilizing best-in-class technology to identify potentially fraudulent payments to stop those payments from going out your door. Some treasury solution providers use the terminology fraud detection tools to refer to having sanction screening or workflow tools in place while others notify you of a fraudulent item after the transaction is sent to the bank. A best-in-class technology solution combines workflow tools and approvals in addition to a robust rules engine and machine learning to identify potentially fraudulent transactions in real-time. Giving you an opportunity to stop any transaction before it leaves your organisation.

Preventing fraud is something that everyone in your organisation needs to commit to in order to prevent fraudsters from being successful.