What is ACH Positive Pay? | In-Depth Guide

Benefits of ACH Positive Pay

The main benefit of ACH positive pay is the control it gives you over your finances. You can leverage that control to reduce the risk of experiencing a loss from unauthorized ACH debits.

You could also save a lot of time by embracing ACH positive pay. Solving an unauthorized payment can take weeks of conversations with your bank. You’ll also only need to manually review and approve transfers from new accounts.

Banks like Fidelity that offer ACH positive pay tend to bundle it with other helpful services, including:

• Automated SMS and email alerts
• Customizable notifications
• Other tools that simplify how you protect your organization from fraud

Implementation Process

The exact steps for implementing ACH positive pay protection will depend on the financial institutions you use. But they generally look something like this:

1. Sign a positive pay agreement to activate ACH positive pay for your account
2. Enable automatic filtering
3. Add known vendors to your approved list by entering their account numbers and other information
4. Save your new filter and choose your preferred notification settings

Over time, you’ll probably need to add and remove vendors or clients from your exception report list. It’ll be important to keep your list of checks up-to-date. Otherwise, an outdated approved account could be used to launch an attack.

ACH Positive Pay vs. Other Fraud Prevention Methods

ACH positive pay is just one fraud protection tool you can use to keep your funds safe. There’s also reverse positive pay, which asks the issuer of a payment to monitor transfers instead of you, the recipient. You can even find positive pay for fraudulent checks.

Beyond these automated tools, it’s also important to follow best practices for bank account security. These include using a strong password, enabling two-factor authentication, and placing strict controls on who can access your accounts.

People who try to steal from others’ bank accounts will look to exploit any weak point in your defenses. The more robust your fraud protection and account security, the fewer vulnerabilities they’ll find.

Best Practices for Maximizing ACH Positive Pay

Enabling ACH positive pay is a good first step toward improving your account security. But you’ll need to follow a few best practices to make sure you get as much out of the tool as possible — without creating new security risks in the process.

For example, you should have a centralized system that lets all authorized employees check ACH payments against your approved list. This can speed up processing times for clients and give you a single source of truth for all questions about pending ACH transfers.

However, you can’t let this document fall into the wrong hands. You’ll want to protect it with a password and schedule routine audits to reduce the risk of malicious electronic transactions.

It’s also smart to set a maximum dollar threshold for ACH payments to approved vendors. Your partners can experience bank fraud as well. If an unauthorized user gains access to one of their accounts, they could initiate an ACH transfer with yours. If you have a maximum ACH limit in place, the scammer won’t be able to drain your full account.

Finally, make sure you have a proper system in place for dealing with ACH positive pay activity alerts. You should make sure these go to the right people and are dealt with in a timeframe that fits your business needs. You don’t want a trusted vendor to wait weeks for a payment just because you didn’t see and respond to the alert it generated.