ACH Alert announced today it has reached an agreement with Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota-based Highland Bank, to provide accounts with real-time, actionable alerts when an ACH debit is presented for payment and protection from ACH & wire account takeover.
"A.L.E.R.T and C.O.P.S. drill down to the account level," said Molly Heruth, Senior Vice-President and Director of Operations for Highland Bank. "Our customers will have complete control of what monies leave their accounts and where they are going."
Highland Bank will be using two ACH Alert products: A.L.E.R.T. and C.O.P.S. A.L.E.R.T., a patented technology, is an automated process providing real-time protection for clients and automated return and re-credit processes for the financial institution. C.O.P.S. (Credit Origination Positive-Pay Service), a patent pending technology, provides a multi-layered system of protection using different controls at different points in a transaction process.
"We were approached by our clients about debit filters and other wire fraud prevention techniques," said Heruth. "But blocks and filters are not foolproof and we knew we could find something better for our customers."
Both technologies provide out-of-band verification techniques when suspicious ACH or Wire activity is noticed. A.L.E.R.T. allows financial institutions to notify customers via text message or email when an ACH draft is attempted by an entity that is not recognized on the client's pre-established "white list." Upon notification, the customer can either confirm or reject the transaction. C.O.P.S. provides similar notification when ACH or Wire origination is attempted to unfamiliar account/routing numbers.
ACH Alert's solutions offer Highland increased fraud protection without significantly increasing their overhead or adding administrative responsibilities. Both A.L.E.R.T. and C.O.P.S. are fully automated after initial set up; and the technologies work outside a financial institution's existing networks requiring no system integration.
"From a technology standpoint these products are turn-key," said Craig Boivin, Chief Technology Officer for Highland Bank. "The cut-over seems to be easy to implement and the technology autoyy automates the response for rejected transactions."
Highland Bank will pilot both systems with its employees for the remainder of 2011. Full implementation for all clients is expected to be completed in early 2012.