Are Online Payments Safe In The Current Digital Age?

It’s the worry of every business owner to be involved in any form of fraud and lose their hard-earned money, and it’s even worse when they even implicate their loyal customers.

If it makes sense to collect ACH payments for your business, your biggest question is, are ACH payments safe, right?

Well, yes, they are safe. ACH is regulated by the federal government and operated by the National Clearing House Association (NACHA), an NGO that enforces rules and regulations while keeping the account numbers confidential.

This makes ACH payments secure than other forms of compensation.

Although ACH payments are designed to be safe, you can further improve their security. Some of the ways you can do this include:

1. Work with a trusted payment processor.

The payment processor has a significant impact on the safety of the transactions, so you need to be cautious of the one you work with. Click here for a reputable payment processor if you don’t know where to begin.

An ideal processor should be compliant with the NACHA’s operating rules and seal all risky areas where you can lose money. For example, to avoid losing money when a customer with insufficient funds makes payment only for it to be rejected, work with a merchant with “balance check” tools that confirm that the customer has sufficient funds in their account to cover the said transaction.

The merchant should also have fraud preventing tools protecting you from any form of fraud.

2. Remove human data input.

Even your employees are a risk as they can collect your customer’s information and use it to access funds, instead of emailing your customers or collecting their information over the phone, set up a secure portal where they enter their banking information so that none of your employees can see it.

You also should make use of tokenization and encryption. Encryption is a process of encoding data to ensure that it’s only visible to the intended recipient.

Tokenization replaces the private information with a unique and unrelated set of characters that don’t make sense and are of no value to those seeing it. This way, you don’t worry even if sensitive data lands in the wrong hands.

3. Use two-factor authentication

Doing this deters any bad actors that might maliciously use your platform or service. When you implement two-factor authentication (2FA), you have peace of mind knowing that your money and business are protected so that even if your customers are using weak passwords, no one can access their account without sending the email or phone verification code.

4. Use micro-deposits

Most third-party payment processors make two micro-deposits into a user’s bank account to verify their identity before making a formal financial transaction.

Check with your payment processor and if this option is in the settings, activate it, and it will come in handy at preventing fraud and knowing your customers more as you have all of their details.

5. ACH is safe

As you have seen, ACH payments are safe, and there is no reason you shouldn’t accept them in your business. For peace of mind that even your customers are protected when using your platform, work with a reputable payment processor with all the safety features in place.