Businesses Need Proactive Anti-Fraud Strategies to Ensure Growth

Now that Paycheck Protection Program loans have dried up, we’re seeing an overwhelming surge of intent of fraud, TreviPay CEO Brandon Spear writes in the PYMNTS eBook “Baseline 2022: What the Next Six Months Holds,” and that’s making comprehensive cybersecurity measures more important than ever.

It’s accurate to say that 2022 has been just as unpredictable as the years prior and it continues to be difficult to forecast what the next six months will hold. A recession seems quite probable. We’re seeing a negative impact on consumer stocks and spending has dropped. Families are making harder choices about how they spend their disposable income. All this coming on the heels of two years of historic spending makes it more difficult than ever for retailers and other businesses to properly plan.

While it’s impossible to prepare for every unknown, there are steps that businesses can take to protect themselves and their bottom lines. Fraud has always been an issue that companies have had to think about, but the pandemic diverted fraudsters’ attention. With the amount of money that was flowing into the economy from stimulus, loan and bail out packages, these bad actors strayed from their normal hunting grounds. In fact, U.S. News & World Report recently reported that tens of billions of dollars may have been awarded to fraudsters as part of a COVID loan program overseen by the U.S. Small Business Administration and aimed at helping small businesses.

During this same period, businesses and merchants, especially those in the B2B space, scrambled to get their eCommerce offerings up and running. For many B2B companies, this was the first time they had made their products and services available online. Generally, more online customer acquisition is a good thing, but it can be difficult to manually onboard customers that you’ve never interacted with before. These are customers you know nothing about, including their previous payment histories. It means that companies need to be thoughtful about who they onboard and what credit lines they feel comfortable offering while also ensuring their onboarding process is scalable as they grow.

Read the entire article, originally found on PYMNTS.com