Your operations team’s ability to process payments should never determine where you can do business. But as you scale and take on new opportunities from varying regions across the world, navigating security and compliance to safely complete transactions can become a full-time job.
When moving money around the world, you’re trusted to ensure that both your client’s sensitive information and the payment itself will be handled securely. Trust is one of the most important elements for any business relationship. And that’s why when sending a payment across the world, most companies naturally turn to a bank as a trusted provider to handle their international payment process.
Bank-grade security may offer your team peace of mind when processing payments, but it comes at a hefty price and often means that a big chunk of your team’s time is spent managing the overall bank relationship. Plugging into a third-party payments platform not only saves you time and money, but simultaneously offers best-of-breed, secure technology. Here’s four things you should know about secure payments before integrating with a payments platform.
An operations manager’s worst nightmare is suspicion (or actual act) of fraud by anyone on their team. Because at the end of the day, the manager is ultimately responsible. As such, part of your team’s comprehensive security process should include strong access control.
In a typical dual authorization process, a member of your team is tasked with entering payment details to your banking platform while another individual, typically a manager or higher ranking employee, is responsible for verifying that data and signing off. Unfortunately, any time payments are entered manually, no matter the security processes in place, there’s a risk of errors or fraudulent payments getting processed.
By introducing automation into the payment process through integration with a payments API, you effectively eliminate that risk. Simply put, automation eliminates the human element, and with it, the likelihood of fraud and errors from a manual process.
With Currencycloud’s API, we’ve created a workflow approval process that can be customized, allowing you to have dual (or multiple) authorization for all your international payments. That way, no individual can single-handedly commit fraud, as one person (or multiple people) on your team would be assigned to submitting a file for the payments, while a different person would verify the accuracy of the data before it is released. You control exactly who has access to what and when any time an employee interacts with the payments platform.
In the highly regulated industry that is international payments, what it takes to be compliant in England versus what it takes to be compliant in China are two entirely different standards. Before some compliance processes like KYC and sanctions screening were automated, ensuring that your payments process adhered to the requirements in each country you do business would’ve been the responsibility of your compliance team. As your business and number of payment scales, keeping up with the cost and demand of compliance becomes taxing.
With an integrated payments platform, automation completes all due diligence, updates in real time and takes the guess work out of what it means to be truly compliant. Currencycloud, as an example, runs automated compliance checks for every single payment sent to over 200 countries, so you can rest assured your payments are in the clear, wherever they may be headed.
Completing payments through your bank will certainly get your money from point A to B, but along the way you’re often left guessing as to where exactly your money is and when it’s going to arrive. Our payments platform gives you a higher level of transparency into the end-to-end payment process — so you’ll always know where your money is and that it’s moving to where it should be, with no gray-area along the way.
There are a variety of checks that need to be in place in order to ensure your payments remain secure and offer peace of mind for your team, network of suppliers and/or customers. There are beneficiary checks to make sure that everyone operating on your payments platform is reliable and that funds are not being routed to anyone on a sanctions list. There are risk checks that are ran to verify that the terms of your payment are not violating any regionally specific regulations, and the list could go on. Before integrating with a payments platform, those individual checks would be something that fell on your team. But with payment automation, you can be sure that everything is in order, without taking up your team’s precious time.
Partnering with Currencycloud grants you access to more than just a payments platform. Our business has been methodically built to ensure everything from our technology to our expanding banking network are rooted in the best and most secure practices around today. If you’d like to learn more about plugging into the Currencycloud ecosystem, schedule a discovery call with a payment expert today.