How to set up PTX Protect Essential and Professional on existing payment profiles – Bottomline PTX

How to set up PTX Protect on existing payment profiles

The Protect module in PTX is designed to help secure your business and prevent fraud and error by scanning each payment file that is created within PTX.

Protect enables you to set up alert features against a payment profile to ensure you are completely alerted about the creation of a payment file, or it is blocked from submission completely, if it meets the alert criteria you have selected.

You can also set up deny lists of accounts you deem high risk, and should not be seen within a payment file.

This guide will take you through the steps required for your PTX administrator to set up the alert features and deny lists within the Protect module.

To help you navigate the section of the guide that you require, please click on the quick links below:

Setting up PTX Protect within existing Payment Profiles
Receiving and Viewing Alerts
Deny Lists
Setting up Deny Lists Manually
Importing Deny Lists in bulk
Risk Logs

Setting up PTX Protect within existing payment profiles

To set up the alert features on your payment profiles, navigate to the Settings menu and select Payment profiles.
Identify the payment profile that you want to apply the alert features to and click on the 3 dots (...) next to the PROFILE NAME under ACTIONS. From here, select View.
On viewing the Payment profile, select the Risk management tab.
Here you'll find the alert features that you can apply to the chosen Payment profile. The options you can see are split between Protect and Secure Payments Professional.

Protect are Secure Payments static alerts.

Protect Status Alerts

Secure Payments Professional is PTX's enhanced machine learning powered alert features. These are features that will alert you to unusual activity based on your business' use of PTX.

Secure Payments Professional alerts.
- - Instructions of an unusual daily amount
  - Payments made outside of account's regular activity time.
The alert features are set to "Disabled" by default to allow tailoring to your requirements.
- - Disabled will allow the payment profile to process uninhibited. No logging will occur.

To activate the alerts, you'll need to select "Alert" or "Block" for each feature.
- - Alert is advisory only. This will not prevent a user (depending upon payment permission defined by their role) from then approving or committing a payment file.
  - Block will immediately stop the file, which has been uploaded or manually entered, from being submitted, if any of the alert features are triggered.
When you enable the rule 'When an account is in a deny list' by selecting either Alert or Block, a list of your created deny lists will display. You can select which deny list you want to activate. You can activate as many as you need. Please click here for instructions for setting up Deny Lists.
When you have finished setting Risk management on this menu, click Save changes.
These alert features will then be applied to your payment profile.

For Secure Payment Professional, we advise that you set your alert features to "Alert", in the first instance. This way you can begin to understand how the machine learning works, without any payments being Blocked. You can adjust settings in the future..

Receiving and viewing alerts

If a payment file meets the alert criteria, alerts will be visible on the Processing Results tab within the payment file window on creation.
Clicking View to the alert description will enable you to see more information about that specific alert.

After reviewing on this screen, depending on whether alerts are set to "Alert" or "Block", further actions can be made.

If set to "Alert", the submission can be Approved or Rejected, depending on the outcome of the review on this screen.

If set to "Block", the submission will be automatically rejected and need to be archived, then once amended, reupload to PTX.

Transactions that have met the criteria to Alert or Block can also be found by clicking on Risk log within the Protect module.
A rejection email will also be sent to any user with access to this particular payment profile, highlighting that alert features were identified.

Deny lists

Deny lists contain any pre-populated combinations of sort codes and account numbers deemed high risk and can be set up to monitor specific bank accounts from appearing in certain payment profiles. For example, a list of ex-employee bank accounts can be screened against a Payroll payment profile, to ensure no ex-employees are paid in error.

To set up your business' deny lists, navigate to the Protect tab, and select Deny lists. Only users with the relevant role permissions will see this module (normally administrators).
In this section, you will find two sub-menus; Risk logs and Deny list.
Select Deny list from the sub-menu to create a new deny list.
In this window there are 10 lists that you can add accounts to.

Setting up Deny lists manually

To add accounts to the deny list, click on the 3 dots (...) under ACTIONS.
From here, select View.
To add a new account, click Add account and enter the bank account details for the bank account that needs to be denied.
To include another bank account in the deny list click Add.

The previously added bank details are saved in the background while you continue.

When you've added the final bank account to the payment deny list, untick Add another and click Add once more to complete your list.
The entry can now be seen in the list.
To edit a deny listed account, click on the 3 dots (...) under ACTIONS and select View. This will give you the option to edit an account and save changes.
Once your deny list is complete, click the back arrow to return to the Deny list homepage.
To rename a deny list, click on the 3 dots (...) under ACTIONS, and select Rename. Enter a name and click Save.
To clear an existing deny list, click the 3 dots (...) under ACTIONS and click Clear list.

Importing Deny lists in bulk

To import a list of bank account details in bulk, you can create an Excel file.

Ensure the file is formatted in the order below:

Once the list has been completed - save this as a .csv file.
Navigate to the Protect module and select Deny list. Click View on the list you want to Import to.
Select Import file and navigate to the location where the .csv file has been saved to.
Highlight the required file and click Open.
The list will now be imported, and you will see the list of accounts now in the deny list.

Once you have set up your deny list as per the steps detailed above, you'll need to assign these to a payment profile.

You can choose which payment profiles your deny list is active on and whether payments to denied accounts are set to Alert or Block in the system. This is completed through the Risk management tab in the payment profile. Under Protect alert feature, Account is in a denied list, click SELECT LISTS THAT APPLY, and select the list that you want to screen against for this payment profile.

Risks Logs

Risk logs can be accessed from the Protect menu on the navigational bar
Risk logs contain the history of all items that have been processed, based on your payment profile Risk management settings, when manually creating or importing a payment file.
- - This information will be visible for as long as the payment profile itself remains within the system (up to 12 months).
For easy reporting, the filter menu in this section will allow you to locate particular items based on each header. The Risk log can be exported for internal auditing purposes where required.

Articles in this section