Introducing Positive Pay
Positive Pay gives your customers enterprise-grade fraud prevention
Introducing Positive Pay
Positive Pay is a fraud prevention control that helps your customers prevent unauthorized or altered checks, ACH debits, and approved wire drawdowns from clearing their accounts. They define which items they expect, and anything that doesn’t match can be flagged or returned according to bank-supported rules.
This is a standard enterprise banking control, and it’s often required for programs that process checks at scale.
Why it matters
Fraud creates real operational pain. A single unauthorized check, unexpected ACH debit, or unapproved wire drawdown doesn’t just create a financial loss; it drives support volume, reversals, and erosion of trust in your product.
Positive Pay helps reduce that risk by putting clear guardrails around check, ACH, and wire activity. Your customers specify expected items, and non-matching transactions are flagged or handled according to the bank-supported rules before settlement. Unlike reactive measures like chargebacks or disputes that address fraud after the fact, Positive Pay is a preventative control that stops unauthorized transactions before they clear.
For platforms embedding financial workflows, this means more predictable payment behavior and less downstream cleanup.
How it works
Positive Pay is commonly applied to check flows, where the risk of forged, altered, or duplicate checks is highest. It often works in conjunction with Stop Payments, which block specific known checks, while Positive Pay validates incoming checks against a broader set of expected payment details. Together, they create layered defense before settlement.
With Positive Pay enabled:
- Your platform submits expected payment details in advance
- Incoming items are matched against those details
- Payments that match clear normally
- Payments that don’t match are flagged or rejected based on configured rules
Unit supports the underlying bank coordination and validation logic for Positive Pay, so you don’t need to build approval flows or exception tooling yourself.
What your customers get
Positive Pay allows your customers to define expected items and exception preferences within bank-supported controls for check, ACH clearing, and wire drawdown without needing to interact with bank-specific processes or tooling, as the experience is integrated into your platform.
They get stronger protection against fraud, and a clearer, more predictable payment experience inside your product.
Availability
Positive Pay is available now for Unit-powered accounts. Existing customers can contact their Success Manager to enable Positive Pay and review the implementation requirements.
Documentation: https://www.unit.co/docs/positive-pay/
Unit is a financial technology company and not a bank. Banking services are provided by one or more Unit's bank partners, Members FDIC.
