FIS Positive Pay is a fraud-prevention service offered by financial institutions to their business customers. It helps protect against check and ACH fraud by automatically comparing transactions presented for payment against a list of authorized payments provided by the business. Any discrepancies, called "exceptions," are flagged for the business to review and decide whether to approve or reject the payment.
How FIS Positive Pay Works
The core process involves three steps.
Issuing/Authorizing Payments
Checks –
“Regular/Full” Positive Pay - When a business writes a check, it creates a file containing details like the check number, dollar amount, payee name, and date. This file is then uploaded to the Positive Pay system.
Reverse Positive Pay, typically used for businesses with lower check volume, excludes the step of uploading a file of issued checks.
ACH – As ACH debits are presented for payment, the business user can authorize those individual debits and/or authorize similar debits (e.g., same originator, same amount) to be paid in the future (i.e., create an ACH authorization filter). This information is stored in the Positive Pay system.
Verification – When a check or ACH debit is presented for payment, the bank loads files containing the details for each of these into the positive pay system. For Regular Check and ACH Positive Pay, the system software automatically compares the payment details to the file(s) the business provided.
Exception Handling – If the details don't match, or in the case of Reverse Positive Pay where there are no details to match against, the payment is flagged as an "exception." The bank notifies the business, which then logs into a secure portal to review the exception and make a decision to "pay" or "return" the item, and in the case of ACH, create a filter for paying future similar items.
FIS Positive Pay Implementation via SSO in Narmi
Implementing FIS Positive Pay via Single Sign-On (SSO) integrates the fraud-prevention service directly into the Narmi Banking platform. SSO allows a user to access multiple, independent applications with a single set of login credentials.
Business users must contact your institution’s staff to manually enroll in person or over the phone. Once enrolled, the business user accesses Positive Pay from Narmi Banking via Tools > Positive Pay. This seamless integration allows users to manage their Positive Pay exceptions from a single dashboard without needing to log in separately to a different application.
Please contact your Narmi Relationship Manager to get started with FIS Positive Pay implementation. Your institution will require a contract with FIS for the tool and one with Narmi for the integration.