Financial Services

Payment fraud often begins with a believable request from an apparently familiar person. A compromised mailbox, convincing voice, or video meeting can create pressure to bypass normal checks. Require independent verification when a beneficiary, account number, payment destination, or approval pattern changes. Use contact information already held in a trusted directory, not details supplied in the request.

Use Plutus and Psycher within documented payment-review workflows. Their findings should support the authorized employee's decision, not replace segregation of duties. Preserve the request, verification record, and approval history so investigators can reconstruct what happened.

• Require two authorized people for sensitive payment changes.
• Give treasury staff a clear escalation path that remains available during executive travel.

Map connections among core systems, customer portals, identity providers, managed services, and payment processors. Vendor access should have a named sponsor, a defined purpose, and an expiration date. Review emergency accounts and service credentials alongside ordinary employee accounts.

Start Relay integrations with limited permissions and agreed data boundaries. Use Librarian to organize asset and ownership information, and Argus to inform reviews of exposed credentials. Any investigation should distinguish a confirmed compromise from an unverified external report before changing access or notifying customers.

• Remove dormant integrations and restrict administrative sessions.
• Test how essential services continue when a critical provider becomes unavailable.

Maintain an incident plan covering fraud operations, legal counsel, compliance, communications, and technology recovery. Disclosure and notification obligations depend on the institution, affected information, jurisdiction, and applicable rule; avoid relying on a single deadline for every event.

Judge can help organize control evidence, Growler can support evidence handling, and Dewey can help coordinate response planning. Human owners must approve consequential actions, materiality determinations, filings, and external communications. Exercise a scenario involving both a fraudulent payment and a vendor outage, then assign owners to the gaps discovered.

• Retain time-synchronized logs and protected recovery copies.
• Record decisions, uncertainties, and the evidence supporting each escalation.