Tool

Payment verification protocol

Most successful payment fraud works because an instruction arrived through a channel that could be faked, and was acted on before anyone checked. This is a one-page procedure that closes that gap, written to be printed, agreed and followed.

When it applies

The protocol applies to any new payee, any change of bank details on an existing payee, any payment above the threshold the family has agreed, and any instruction that arrives with urgency attached. Those four cases cover almost every way money leaves a household or a family office by mistake.

The patterns it is written against, invoice redirection, business email compromise, cloned voices and pressure to bypass the usual steps, are described in the guide to how families and family offices are defrauded. The sheet below is the operational answer to them.

Nothing on this page is filled in on screen. There is no form, nothing is stored, and nothing is sent to this site. The sheet is printed, written on by hand, agreed and kept by the family.

This is a template. Adopt it deliberately: agree the thresholds and the named people, write them in, and make sure everyone who moves money for the family has a copy. It is a control, not a guarantee, and it is not financial or legal advice.

The sheet

Payment verification protocol

This procedure is followed before any payment is made to a new payee, to changed bank details, or above the thresholds recorded below.

Adopted: Review by:

  1. No new payee, change of bank details, or payment above the agreed threshold is actioned on an email, message or call alone, however plausible, whoever it appears to come from.
  2. Verify every such instruction by calling back on a number taken from our own records, never a number, link or reply address contained in the instruction itself.
  3. If the instruction appears to come from a family member or senior person, the call-back rule still applies. A voice on a call is not verification: cloned voices exist. Call back on the known number.
  4. Payments above the higher threshold require a second approver, verified the same way.
  5. Urgency, secrecy or pressure to bypass this procedure is itself a red flag. Stop and verify. A genuine counterparty will wait.
  6. If details were changed recently, the first payment to the new details is verified again.
  7. If any step fails or feels wrong, no payment is made, and the concern is raised with the named contact below the same day.

Verification threshold

Higher threshold requiring a second approver

Named approver

Named approver

Where our known-number list is kept

Record the location only. Do not write telephone numbers, account details or any agreed verification phrase on this sheet.

Named contact for concerns

Date of last review

Agreed by Signature Date

Agreed by Signature Date

This is a template, adopted and dated by the people who signed above. It is a control, not a guarantee, and it is not financial or legal advice. Source: danielmcclurefisher.co.uk/tools/verification-protocol/

Adopting it

Print the sheet, fill in the thresholds and the names by hand, and have the people who move money sign it. A protocol nobody has read is not a control.

Printing produces the one-page sheet only, without the rest of this page. Choosing to save as PDF in the print dialogue gives you a file you can circulate.

  • Who should hold a copy. Everyone who can move money: the principal, their spouse, the PA, the bookkeeper, and any family office staff with payment authority. If someone can instruct a payment, they are inside the protocol.
  • Rehearse it once. Walk through a call-back on a real payee, using the known-number list, so that the first real use is not the first use. It takes ten minutes and it is the step most often skipped.
  • Keep the known-number list somewhere else. The value of the protocol is that the numbers come from your own records rather than from the instruction. Those records need to be current, and they need to be reachable by the person doing the checking.
  • Review it annually, and sooner on any change. A change of bank, a change of bookkeeper, a new company or a departure all make the written names wrong. Date the review line when you do it.

Beyond the sheet

A protocol on paper covers the moment of payment. It does not cover the account takeover, the compromised mailbox or the assistant's device that made the fraudulent instruction plausible in the first place. Those are the subject of the guide to how families and family offices are defrauded, and where a family wants that side looked at properly rather than read about, it is the family cyber review.