ValidiFI Debuts Authoritative Bank Account Verification Tool

Bank account and payment intelligence firm ValidiFI has begun offering new authoritative bank account verification capabilities.

It’s part of an expansion of the company’s vAccount+ suite, designed to give companies greater coverage and accuracy when conducting account verifications, the company announced Thursday (April 17).

“Expanding the vAccount+ suite to include authoritative bank account verification empowers organizations in the B2B payments space to make informed decisions, optimize workflows and improve risk management strategies,” ValidiFI CEO John Gordon said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.

“This addition reflects our commitment to delivering actionable insights that drive smarter, more efficient business operations.”

The release notes that — in a time of heightened need for robust data for fraud prevention and risk management — ValidiFI’s data network includes access to J.P. Morgan Payments’ validation services and Early Warning, which contains deposit performance data from more than 2,500 financial institutions, banking giants such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America among them.

“This provides our clients with frictionless, highly reliable validation to minimize false declines for legitimate customers, reduce payment returns, and lower the administrative burden of manual reviews,” the release added. “The result is a more efficient process that builds trust, enhances customer experience and streamlines payment operations.”

PYMNTS spoke earlier this month with ValidiFI’s Eric Stratman about the need for greater fraud protection. Stratman, the company’s senior director of analytics and insights, said that many firms wrestle with outdated risk assessment processes, transacting online and across ACH networks playing a losing game of catch-up with scammers.

“Fraudsters are constantly evolving” as they shift to different attack vectors depending on the “use case” of the customer and the payment being made, Stratman told PYMNTS.

When companies “use standard validation methods to verify payments, they’re lagging,” he said. There’s no longer any way for a bank to just look at variables or data points to ensure that bank accounts are valid — one of the first lines of defense against criminals.

Research late last year from PYMNTS Intelligence showed that 28% of payments executives were witnessing an uptick in fraud and risk management uncertainties, and a commensurate percentage saw losses that surpassed half a million dollars in the prior 12 months.

Additional PYMNTS Intelligence research, conducted in partnership with i2c, found that 28% of consumers had fallen victim to credit card fraud last year. Beyond that, 37% said they were “very” or “extremely” worried about becoming the victim of such fraud, according to “Consumer Credit Economy: Credit Card Fraud.”