Cost-effective ways to check source of funds for larger client payments?

neighbourhoodcat

I help run a small but growing SaaS business and we’re starting to take on some higher-value business clients. We’ve been looking at doing a bit more due diligence on where payments are coming from, mainly to avoid issues later on.

At the moment, proper checks seem quite manual or require specialist support, which can get expensive quickly. I’ve seen Open Banking mentioned as a way to verify account activity, but I’m not sure how practical that is for a small team.

From a cost and simplicity point of view, is there a sensible way to do basic “source of funds” checks without needing a full compliance setup, or does it usually end up being more complex (and costly) than expected?

born_again

Open Banking would require customer to have it. Many will not.

roarrory33

I suspect a lot depends on the size of the payments and how much risk the business is trying to manage.

For straightforward business payments, I’d imagine many smaller companies probably just do basic checks and only look more closely if something unusual stands out. Otherwise the cost and admin could get excessive quite quickly.

Open Banking sounds useful in theory, but I can also see the point above that not every customer will be comfortable using it or even have it set up.