This brief release appears in Finextra and discusses a $2.5 million funding round for a 2014 Australian startup by the name of EFTsure, which purports to helping organizations identify and protect themselves against risk and error in the payments process. 

‘…the eftsure software suite verifies supplier bank account details and compliance information at or prior to the point of payment. Its customers include ASX-listed enterprises, local and state governments, not for profits, hospitals, schools and small to medium businesses across Australia…The firm claims to have protected over $6 billion in electronic payment transactions since inception.’ 

While we have yet to benefit from a briefing, the niche that the firm fits into is supplier verification. As many who closely follow the ever-adaptive payments fraud tactics have noted, business e-mail compromise and social engineering have become very sophisticated methods for fraudsters to manipulate company employees into making payments to fictitious companies.

We covered this most recently in a report titled Fighting Payments Fraud: No Rest for the Weary. In that piece, we pointed out one survey where only about 45% of corporates indicated that they were able to detect ACH fraud before the payment left the building (so to speak). So the CEO of EFTsure goes on to add that with the continued evolution of new payments methods and faster settlement, additional factors have entered the mix.

We’re frequently asked about the faster payments, faster fraud dynamic, so a mention of Australia’s NPP was interesting, since faster (settlement in seconds) places the ‘know your payee’ importance level near or at the top of the list. This is perhaps a good niche to be in at the moment.

‘Other investors joining the round also include Stephen Allen, former global chief risk officer with Macquarie Bank….Allen says: “I’m excited about the application of fintech to risk management and exploring how to apply my experience in that sphere. The National Payment Platform is accelerating the issue and in eftsure I saw an elegantly simple but extremely powerful solution to a pervasive and growing problem.” ‘

Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group