Recently, a number of instances of account takeovers—or "man in the middle" attacks—have been labeled as ACH or wire transfer fraud because the subsequent fraudulent transactions flowed over the ACH or wire transfer networks. Such schemes frequently involve an interloper using the Internet to hack into a company's payroll system and create fraudulent transactions before the payroll file arrives at the company's originating bank. At first blush, it seems off base to attribute this type of fraud to the payments channel when the channel merely carried already fraudulent payments on to their intended destinations. Once these payments enter the clearing channel, banks and ACH/wire operators do not appear to have any easy way to identify them as fraudulent transactions.
The growing responsibility of banks to help their customers
Clearly, American businesses are in the eye of the storm when it comes to current account takeover attacks, so it's easy, if not appropriate, to attribute the fraud to absent or lax controls over their corporate databases. Needless to say, the smaller the business, the less likely that their knowledge, business model, or budgets include funding for fighting Internet-based fraud attacks. With this idea in mind, a judge recently ruled that such a company's bank was at least partially responsible for a corporate fraud loss because the bank had failed to assist the company by providing reasonable fraud control tools or services.
Such claims stem from a requirement stated in Article 4A of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) that makes banks responsible for using "commercially reasonable" security techniques to protect the data assets of the customer and bank. The term commercially reasonable does not have a specific definition but historically has been defined as the use of techniques significantly deployed by other similar industry service providers. Since there is no evidence that many banks provide ACH origination fraud detection services to their corporate customers, the historical test doesn't seem to have held sway in this case. Instead, it appears the judge used a different test for commercial reasonableness by indicating that there are technologies and tools available in the marketplace today, albeit not in wide use in banking, which the bank could have employed to assist the company. As we speak, and in a separate matter, a Texas bank is suing its business customer, claiming that at all times the bank maintained commercially reasonable security measures. The outcome of this action remains to be seen.
The potential for fee-based fraud detection services
Transferring the issue to the ACH payments front, perhaps it would be possible for banks to provide businesses with enhanced account takeover fraud control tools. For example, banks could offer the equivalent of positive pay in the check world for outbound ACH credit entries. That is, the company could update bank resident databases with their eligible payroll (or the bank could retain recent files), and the bank could validate the information on newly deposited payroll files to ensure that a significant amount of new account numbers have not been introduced since the last payroll. Other services could include looking for significant variations in the number or dollar amount of transactions or requiring that companies assert dual controls on all payroll deposits before the payments enter the ACH processing stream at the originating financial institution.
Such services might seem expensive to implement since they would entail the writing or acquisition of new front-end software. However, the provision of such runtime services to client companies could be a revenue opportunity for a fee-starved banking industry whose current fee revenue streams (overdrafts, interchange, credit card interest rates) are under attack on all fronts. Further, such grassroots corporate payments services could better address fraud at the inception point rather than the after-the-fact central monitoring of unauthorized returns by NACHA or the ACH operators. In fact, the ACH operators offer front-end fee-based risk monitoring services to their financial institution customers today, demonstrating the possible value of banks extending the concept to their corporate clients. Finally, one can conceive of the evolution of a suite of such services to include services that could detect potential insider fraud, a growing trend in a recessionary economy.
By Rich Oliver, executive vice president, FRB Atlanta's Retail Payments Risk Forum