As the host to the financial industry’s largest cooperative check fraud prevention database in the country, High Point-based Advanced Fraud Solutions saw a “banner year” in 2020 and has implemented two new products.
Lawrence Reaves, CEO and president of AFS, said the company has added 80 new financial institutions to its customer roster. With over 800 clients total. In 2020, AFS successfully identified and stopped more than 2.5 million fraudulent checks at the point of presentment, worth a combined $2.2 billion.
AFS’ year-over-year revenue increase was 30% for 2020 after recording a 20% increase in 2019.
“[2020] is one of our top three years since we’ve been in business [since 2007],” Reaves said.
In 2020, the pandemic caused a significant increase in the rate of fraudulent behavior, which Reaves credits to more mobile banking, an influx in government checks and record unemployment numbers.
“Those kinds of combinations… made it right for fraudsters to take advantage,” Reaves said.
AFS, which has 26 employees split between High Point and Folsom, Calif., didn’t have to add employees to meet the growing client database, Reaves said. AFS is a hosted software system, which allows its database to be accessed entirely from remote locations or servers.
“We can add 80 new customers in a year and really don’t have to add a new employee just because of the nature of how the hosted software system works,” he said.
AFS has also announced it is releasing a new product, Positive Pay, which aims to promote collaboration between finance teams and their banks.
The platform allows businesses to enter checking information to their respective banks, giving the business accountholder more control and reducing the chance of being compromised.
“So, we’re extending our protection to the credit unions and the bank’s customer, essentially,” Reaves said.
One of the main challenges Reaves predicts for 2021 is the increase in automated clearing house (ACH) transactions. To meet this challenge, the fraud prevention firm has also released its prevention product called “TrueACH.”
TrueACH prevents losses in real-time by running each account number and routing number through the AFS negative check database to detect any questionable activity.
Along with the growth in ACH transactions, new regulations surrounding ACH are also becoming more prevalent, Reaves said.
In 2020, AFS expanded its partnership program with FIS, DaLand Kiosk Banking and SwitchThink, among others.
Reaves said the goal with these partnerships is to facilitate “more seamless integrations” with AFS’ solutions across various deposit channels and payment types in an effort to prevent a broader set of fraudulent attacks.
Reaves said AFS plans to continue growing these partnerships for 2021 and develop new partnerships.
“We’re also going to continue to grow with our major banking integration partners and we’re going to continue to sell into the large banking market,” Reaves said.
