With both check and Automated Clearing House (ACH) transaction fraud at persistently high levels, more banks and credit unions are doing whatever they can to reduce losses. Some are going so far as to have customers sign liability waivers if they don’t use Positive Pay. That is a term used industrywide for a service that allows financial institutions to verify the validity of their business customers’ checks and ACH transactions.
Several core providers and other vendors offer Positive Pay software solutions. The service has traditionally required a business customer to provide their institution with a list of checks or ACH transactions they initiate each day. The institution then verifies that each check or transaction attributed to that customer matches the list provided. Some institutions also offer reverse positive pay. In that scenario, an institution provides a business customer with a list of their checks or transactions that came across for payment, and allows them to approve or flag each item on the list.
Scott Anchin, senior vice president of strategic initiatives and policy for the Independent Community Bankers of America, says Positive Pay has been effective in preventing fraud. “If the money is being stopped before it leaves the bank, there’s fewer losses for the bank,” he says. “I think this is one example where it benefits the customer and the bank equally at the same time.”
Fraud concerns are on the rise. Ninety-nine percent of the bank CEOs, chief risk officers and other technology executives who responded to Bank Director’s 2026 Risk Survey said their institutions or customers had been directly impacted by check fraud over the past 18 months. Another 68% indicated a direct impact from ACH or wire fraud as well.
Anchin says much of that fraud begins outside of the financial institution. For example, mail fraud often leads to check fraud. “[It’s the] same kind of thing when we think about ACH fraud,” he says. “We see a lot of scams out there. And again, the banks have no visibility into these things as they’re originated. But when you have business email compromise and things like that, they hit the bank.”
Adoption Remains Low
Despite those fraud trends, customer adoption of Positive Pay remains low. A 2025 Datos Insights report found just 29% of financial institutions are either satisfied or very satisfied with their current adoption rates.
Julie Macaluso, vice president of treasury management for $1.26 billion Amplify Credit Union, based in Austin, Texas, says only about 10% of the institution’s commercial business members use the service. “Positive Pay does require a little bit of work, and some people are averse to needing to do a little bit of work on their end,” she says.
Andy Schornack, president of $1.3 billion Security Bank & Trust Co., based in Glencoe, Minnesota, says many of his small business customers feel they are simply too busy to take the time to submit the required information each day. He says adoption typically doesn’t happen unless or until a business customer has been a victim of fraud. “That’s usually [like], ‘Hey, I had a check for $3,000 clear my account. That was not a correct check.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, yeah, that’s why we have Positive Pay,’” he says. “It’s not a very costly expense, but it’s good insurance so that you don’t run into that same loss again.”
While Security Bank & Trust Co. charges a monthly fee for Positive Pay, Amplify Credit Union does not. But Macaluso says most of Amplify’s business members still don’t adopt it until there is a problem. “There’s a fraud; they’re shocked — and that’s when we can talk about Positive Pay again,” she says.
The Case for Requiring Opt Outs
The increased fraud concerns and low adoption rates are both contributing to a rise in the number of banks now requiring business customers to formally opt out of Positive Pay if they don’t want it. Union State Bank, a $719 million institution headquartered in Arkansas City, Kansas, states on its website that businesses choosing to opt out “are assuming responsibility for any fraudulent or unauthorized transactions that could have been prevented by these services, except in cases where we acted in bad faith or our negligence contributed to the loss.” The $2.6 billion KS State Bank, based in Manhattan, Kansas, states on its website, “For accounts that you choose to opt out of Positive Pay, a Liability Waiver will need to be signed.”
Security Bank and Trust Co. has also incorporated an opt out provision. “It’s part of the [account] opening process that everybody is recommended to sign up for Positive Pay,” Schornack says. “And if you opt out of Positive Pay, then the risk of check fraud is yours.”
Check fraud presents a specific risk due to legal ambiguities over whether the customer or financial institution bears responsibility for it. Anchin says that is the result of incongruence between federal and state laws. “We’ve spent a lot of time from an advocacy perspective helping policymakers to understand some of the concerns associated with these gray areas and how they make it very difficult to truly mitigate check fraud,” he says. “And so we’ve seen a lot of progress, but of course — changing regulation, changing state law — it takes time.”
Positive Pay opt out provisions are even on the radar of Nacha, the industry body that governs the nation’s ACH network. An April 2026 Nacha blog post cited Jordan Bennett, its senior director of ACH network risk management, calling opt out provisions a “fantastic idea.” Bennett said that Nacha’s Risk Management Advisory Group discussed the idea as well.
But opt out provisions aren’t the answer for everyone. Because Amplify Credit Union doesn’t charge a fee for Positive Pay, it can’t afford to require an opt-out provision that would push more business members to use the service. “It’s a very expensive product, and most financial institutions, as far as I understand, offset the cost of offering that service by charging a fee. I’ve seen it as little as $20 a month. I’ve seen it as high as $150 a month,” she says. “We don’t require it because the cost [would be] so great for us.”
While opt out provisions may become even more prevalent, Anchin believes recent technological upgrades could spur an increase in Positive Pay adoption as well. He says many vendors are starting to offer more automation and integrations that effectively eliminate the workload businesses currently face. Anchin cites business accounting software integration as a prime example of that.
“Imagine you have an accounting system that cuts a check for whatever it is — vendor payments or something else. Rather than having to go into a separate system and say, ‘My accounting system has cut a check for $50,000 to X supplier,’ it’s automatically entered into the Positive Pay system,” he explains. “I think that some of those automation pieces that are becoming more and more common, they eliminate one of the huge frictions associated with Positive Pay.”
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