Unleashing the Power of Positive Pay: 5 Takeaways From CONNECT 25
Positive Pay has immense potential—not only in protecting businesses from check and ACH fraud but also in generating revenue for banks and credit unions. But that value only materializes when your business customers adopt the solution. That was the central theme of a CONNECT 25 presentation by Andrew Moore, Senior Product Manager at Q2, and Gwen Perkins, Product Manager at Synovus.
Here are five key takeaways from their conversation.
1. Payments Fraud Isn’t Slowing Down and Checks Remain a Prime Target
No surprises here, but the numbers are still a bit of a gut punch for bankers working to protect their business customers.
• The 2025 AFP Payments Fraud Survey Report revealed that 91% of organizations saw either the same level, or an increase, in the incidence of payments fraud in 2024.
• 63% of AFP respondents said their organization was impacted by fraud in 2024. ACH was second on the list, at 38%.
“We’re going to have (checks) around for quite a while,” Perkins said. “They’re the easiest target for fraud, and the most prevalent, even with the rise of digital fraud.”
2. Positive Pay Is a Fraud Fighting Superpower
Moore also came armed with stats on the impact of Q2’s Positive Pay solution, Centrix Exact Transaction Management System (ETMS).
- In 2024, ETMS helped stop ~$3.7 billion in potential payments fraud-$2.3B from ACH and $1.4B from checks.
- That’s a fivefold increase from ust 2 years earlier ($719M) and a leap from $97M in 2018.
Moore pointed out that ETMS success hinges on bankers proactively supporting their customers’ Positive Pay use.
“This is you guys,” he told the audience. “You are the superheroes, so hats off to you all.”
Synovus used ETMS to stop $89M in fraud in 2024, including $56M in check fraud. One client experienced more than $2M in attempted fraud in just a few months but ETMS caught and stopped all of it.
“Had it not been for their usage of positive pay, the story could be completely different,” Perkins said.
3. The Biggest Challenge? Still Adoption …
Despite Positive Pays’ proven effectiveness, adoption remains a problem. According to a recent Datos survey, while 97% of respondents offered positive pay, only 29% of them were satisfied with their positive pay rates.
Yet 61% of business that had been given Positive Pay for free said they’d be willing to pay for it. Meanwhile, 40% of businesses said they didn’t even know what Positive Pay was!
Clearly there’s still a disconnect when it comes to businesses and Positive Pay.
4. The Challenge Can Be an Opportunity
But if you can foster a better understanding of the value of Positive Pay, then the adoption story changes from struggle to success and from just defending against fraud losses to also generating valuable revenue.
Perkins shared how Synovus has done that via a proactive approach to educating their business customers on Positive Pay. They integrate the solution into all their sales conversations and use marketing channels to share webinars and articles that highlight the value of Positive Pay.
“It’s like medical insurance,” she said. “Nobody wants to pay for it, but when you understand that one night at an ER could cost tens of thousands of dollars, all of a sudden that premium isn’t quite as big a deal.”
Companies that don’t initially adopt Positive Pay but later fall victim to payments fraud, often become quite receptive to adopting the solution after the fact.
Synovus generated 20% year-over-year growth in total Positive Pay accounts from 2023 to 2024. The number of accounts added in 2024 was 75% higher than in 2023.
Perkins noted that Positive Pay is “one of our most profitable products—not in size of dollars, but in terms of percentage margins.”
5. Positive Pay Is Getting Smarter and Simpler
Finally, Moore highlighted several areas in which Q2 is working to make ETMS a more effective Positive Pay solution for banks and credit unions and, in turn, a more attractive option for their business customers.
- Enhancing payee match – AI has been used to upgrade the payee match capability, making it more accurate in confirming payee information. .
“We saw it greatly reduce exceptions,” Perkins said. “Our customers can just give us the name and address and basically we can figure it out without them having to be so precise in terms of the input.”
- Simplifying check data uploads – An integration with a Q2 Innovation Studio product called “Cloud Auto Check Issues” solves a frequent small business problem by connecting the check register of a small business’s accounting system to their Positive Pay and then automatically moving the data over via API, saving time and resources.
- Adding an AI-Powered Co-Pilot: Q2 is adding its copilot, Andi, into ETMS to help identify good candidates for positive pay and to aid in onboarding new customers.
What’s Next
To learn more about tapping into the power of Positive Pay, check out the resources linked below. Or just reach out here to have a conversation with us.