With so many moving parts to your small business, ensuring you’re working with the right teams is a key aspect to streamlining and growing your operations. BankUnited and Intellapro, an employment agency based in St. Petersburg, FL, consider one another true partners and have worked together for years, not only on lending solutions, but also cash flow optimization and fraud prevention, freeing up Intellapro’s finance team to work on more value-added tasks. 

Ed Daugherty, Managing Partner at Intellapro, is used to navigating the many moving parts inherent to running a staffing agency. With a small army of specialized temporary workers to manage, record keeping can get cumbersome and complex. 

“Intellapro has employees in at least 30 states, so from a compliance, tax, and legal perspective, it can get challenging considering all the various registration fees and business license fees involved,” he says. “We also have to consider payroll for both our internal employees and our temp workers. There can be so many moving parts, and we learned the hard way to constantly check for any human error or mistakes in the data.”

Throughout his career, Daugherty has seen how unnoticed mistakes can snowball, becoming more burdensome to clean up months or years down the road. Whether it’s straight-up theft or human error, there are additional costs associated with remedying other people’s mistakes. An error in recorded business income, for example, could leave a company needing to amend tax returns or pay penalties. 

According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) report in 2022, small businesses are 42% more likely to experience fraud compared to large organizations. Daugherty has worked with his team to conduct a risk assessment and created a system of checks and balances to prevent such instances from happening.

“We’ve implemented regularly reviewing our master vendors list and making sure the ACH information is correct and calling them up on the phone to verify any changes,” he says. “We’ve also had separation of duties which we improved upon over time.”

This separation of duties includes a system, implemented by Daugherty, where certain teams don’t all have the same access and multiple employees are needed to complete a transaction, for accuracy and fraud prevention purposes. For instance, onboarding and compliance teams don’t have access to payroll. Plus, payroll teams will have several people each week working on accounts payable and receivables, conducting a passive audit and ensuring accuracy. 

To remain effective, systems need to be dutifully monitored, ideally by a friendly third party. The same ACFE report notes that 49% of fraud cases are due to the overriding of existing controls, or intervention and manipulation by employees when it comes to approving or processing transactions. 

Daugherty knew he wanted to look for a different financial institution when he noticed flaws in the digital tools he was using with his now former bank.

“What can happen is that someone could override the payee's name and write their own banking information to conduct a transaction, so they could transfer the funds into someone’s personal bank account,” he says. 

One example, Daugherty notes, is that a nefarious actor could leave the vendor's name as is but change the banking information to another account to steal company funds. 

“Even if another person who is doing the secondary approval sees a legitimate vendor's name, they may not catch the discrepancies,” says Daugherty. “We’ve been told that nothing can be done about this flaw.”

Ultimately, Daugherty wanted to partner with a financial institution that could do something. BankUnited was able to ensure accurate transactions and provide a system of checks and balances for tasks like verifying transactions.

“One of the safeguards that BankUnited has that I really appreciate is their BankUnited Lynx for ACH Origination feature ,” he says. “If any of our payee’s information doesn't match, the payment doesn’t go through, and we’ve had BankUnited representatives call and email us just to verify all the information is correct as well.”

For funding solutions, Daugherty also respected that BankUnited took the time to understand Intellapro’s industry, business model, and their concerns. As a company that focuses on staffing for hospital networks, an industry that typically pays much later than others, Intellapro needed special insight to ensure their cash flow had sufficient funds on hand to ensure their operations could run smoothly.

“I was thrilled to learn that BankUnited understood our needs and weren’t scared off, because other banks I spoke to about funding didn’t understand Intellapro’s industry,” he says. “Their healthcare knowledge was very attractive and gave me a good feeling from day one. The underwriting process generally has been much simpler. Even when it’s very thorough, it’s just simpler and easier to go through than  what I've experienced in the past.”

That understanding, attentiveness, and personal touch were pillars of BankUnited’s pitch to Intellapro and has proved to be, on top of the remote deposit capture, bill pay, and mobile banking  services BankUnited provides, the most valuable part of their relationship. 

“BankUnited went out of their way to connect me with their customers or prospective customers for me to do business with. That’s never happened to me in the 27 years I’ve worked with banks and funding companies,” says Daugherty. 

Whether your business is looking for better tools to mitigate fraud, a partner that understands your industry inside and out, or a bank that prioritizes your business’ banking, BankUnited has tailored options available for your needs.  

Connect with a BankUnited Banker today and learn more about your options.   

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