If money makes the world go ‘round, a High Point company is finding success helping the money go safely.
Advanced Fraud Solutions announced Wednesday that in the year since it launched its fraud-detection platform for automated clearing house payments, or ACH, it has stopped or flagged more than $21 million in potentially fraudulent ACH transactions, with the system installed for nearly 20 financial institutions.
The company was begun in 2007 and has historically focused on fraud involving checks and credit cards. But particularly during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, consumers and financial institutions began increasingly using ACH, CEO Lawrence Reaves explained in an interview.
The ACH network is the system behind such services as payroll direct deposit and many forms of online bill payment. International remittances can be made through it as well. It’s overseen by NACHA, the National Automated Clearing House Association.
The system is called TrueACH with Account Validation. The base of the system is the ability to check submitted transactions against a database of transactions for signs of fraud.
“We’ve had thousands of banks and credit unions contributing to our database,” Reaves said. “We have 15 years of experience doing that. What we’re really doing at a high level, is we're just matching up the protocols required to transact an ACH against fields that we can validate in our database. And we're able to identify fraudulent transactions or high-risk transactions when you know when essentially those items don't match up. It’s a proprietary database that we’re running most of these fields through."
AFS continues its legacy checking and card products, which continue to grow, Reaves said.
But TrueACH was picked up by NCR, formerly known as National Cash Register and which now is a dominant provider of payment collection and management systems.
“They’re a huge company that’s using our product to help them prevent ACH fraud,” Reaves said. “That’s such a big feather in our cap, coming out of the gate in the first year with our product to have NCR pick it up and integrate it.
AFS is privately held but says that over the past two years, it has increased revenue by 56%, saw a 26% year-over-year increase in new banking customers, and a 29% increase in new technology and reseller partnerships, and now has half the top 100 U.S. credit unions as customers.
Among North Carolina users are Charlotte Metro Credit Union, Peoples Banks and Piedmont Advantage Credit Union.
AFS has its headquarters in High Point, on Mendenhall Oaks Parkway, though it has a Greensboro mailing address. Nineteen employees work there and another seven in Sacramento, California.
“We continue to grow and don't really have to add a lot of head count really because it's a software as a service. So we can add customers and really only have to add server space.”
And while the company isn’t immune to the tight labor market for software developers and people with related skills, it’s holding its own, Reaves said.
“Luckily we have not had a lot of turnover in our team. And we just offered those guys a lot of flexibility. They are working from home, and they're building products that they enjoy, which helps them with their career. So we make sure that we give them a lot of flexibility and let them work on projects they think are cool, and that's what keeps them around.”
