Positive Pay

Positive pay is a service offered by the Cash Management Department of most banks to deter check fraud. Banks use positive pay to match the check payments a company issues with those that get presented for payment. In its simplest form, this security offering uses automation to match the account number, check number and dollar amount of each check presented for payment against a list of checks previously authorized and issued by the company. 

How DPX integrates with Financial Institution Positive Pay offerings 

Because Positive Pay services are bank offerings, the Deluxe Payment Exchange’s role is to feed financial transaction data back to the bank so that the financial institution is able to verify items presented for payment from accounts at their bank. Therefore, for a DPX customer to include DPX payment information in a positive pay data file sent to their bank, the bank must first have an integration agreement with Deluxe to provide positive pay data.  

• Positive pay program buildout with banks has been a major focus for DPX in 2020 -- more banks added to the network each month. 
• Participation is completely voluntary.  We take your privacy very seriously and always ask the Checking Account owner to authorize any sharing of their data. 
• Positive Pay ‘Opt in’ applies to all payments made from a DPX checking account.  This includes both eChecks and Print+Mail checks. 

Troubleshooting problems with Positive Pay 

If you or your financial institution are experiencing unexpected system behavior in regard to positive pay information being transferred to your bank, consider the following:  

1. Eligibility – in order to support a bank’s positive pay offering, each financial institution must first have an agreement with Deluxe to transfer the data.  If you are seeing an option to authorize Positive Pay in your checking account settings screen, it means that an agreement is in place with the bank – and thus you may elect to participate.  If you are not seeing an option for Positive Pay, it means that an agreement is not in place with that bank for DPX to provide positive pay transaction data.  
   

1. Authorization – DPX requires customer authorization before the system will include a checking account’s transaction data in a positive pay feed to a bank.   

• There are two ways to “Opt In” to authorize DPX to include your payment information.  Customers who come through Bank Referrals, are asked whether they want to participate when they set up their account.  Customers who do not come through bank referrals can choose to participate by navigating to the Checking Account settings pay and turning the Positive Pay Data toggle = ON.    
• From the left navigation menu, if you do not see Checking Account under the Settings section, this means you do not have administrative rights to the checking account.  You will need to contact someone within your organization to give you these permissions in order to modify the Positive Pay Data selection. 
• When a Checking Account administrator elects to “Opt in” to authorize DPX to provide positive pay data to their financial institution, a pop-up will come up asking the user whether or not they have enrolled in the program on the bank side.  If they answer “yes”, DPX will begin to include transaction details in our positive pay feed to the bank.  If this question is answered incorrectly (and the checking account is not set up on the bank side to take advantage of the positive pay offering), this will cause an error when the financial institution processes the DPX input data.  The correction needed is for the customer to be sure they have signed up correctly both with the bank and within DPX.