In the United States, the trucking ecosystem has, in the past, been based on a trust-but-verify model. The time has come to let structured data lead the charge. Margins are thinner and average invoice amount is decreasing. Carriers, factors, and brokers are tightening their belts and the need for data-backed verification has never been more apparent.
The transportation industry has been riding high and setting records for a few years. When talking about an industry that accounted for 5.4% of the U.S. GDP in 2022, bad actors and fraudsters are taking advantage of the current lack of validation and verification.
There are three types of carriers within the industry today. Honest carriers that we all love, dishonest carriers which we’re all trying to weed out, and situationally dishonest carriers who are reactive to tightening margins and other industry headwinds. For the latter two, we want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to protect our brokers, factors, and shippers from them.
TriumphPay is taking action to mitigate this risk for brokers, factors, carriers, and shippers, with payment verification, structured data, and security at the core of our Payments Network.
Trust-But-Verify: How Fraud is Impacting the Transportation Industry
The trust-but-verify model may have existed for decades, but the rise in fraud has been exponential over the last few years. It’s likely that a lot of this fraudulent activity has been going on for years, but when freight was at all-time highs, creating safeguards to prevent it wasn’t a top priority. Now, as the industry softens, every dollar counts, and losing money to fraud is no longer tenable.
Addressing this is immensely important to us.
TriumphPay is in a unique position compared to other freightech and fintech companies in the industry because we’re actually moving the money. TriumphPay is moving around 24 billion dollars a year, with very public plans to move much more. With that much at stake, and being owned by a bank, necessitates watchful, proactive, and corrective action toward any fraud that exists in the industry.
Fraudulent or non-existing load invoices, doctored invoices, misdirected payments, carrier impersonation, fraudulent factoring documents, and many other forms of fraud, we believe, can be addressed using shared structured data.
Here’s what we’re doing now.
How TriumphPay is Using Our Network of Structured Data NOW to Enhance Payment Security
Our payments network is real and growing fast.
We’re currently facilitating invoicing and money movement of between 1.2 to 1.3 billion dollars annualized over structured data rails, a rapidly growing subset of the total universe that TriumphPay touches. To be successful, we want to continue to advance and innovate this space within our total product offering.
We have an interesting idea of what success over the course of the next 24 months looks like. Success for us long term is if we put our OCR out of business, then we win. We would much prefer the security and transparency provided by leveraging structured data.
TriumphPay validates invoices against live load data from a Broker’s system of record to directly address and alert factors and brokers to non-existent loads, fraudulent and doctored invoices, and incorrect bank account information. Network participants are alerted to submitted invoices that do not exist, do not match invoice amounts, or are submitted with different bank account information that was previously on file.
Monitoring for suspicious activity is paramount. The TriumphPay Network now helps track the factor assignments across the entire universe of carriers in near real-time. Using structured data as the source of truth within the network, we have historical data records of what we know to be true about carriers. This structured data also prevents carriers from submitting invoices outside of the realm of what’s possible. If a carrier is out of service or moving more freight than their capacity, we will be able to flag that suspicious activity. Plus, we can monitor for any clerical or intentional errors before money starts going to the wrong place.
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. As the network grows and as we add more features and functionality, we’ll be able to offer even more to network brokers, factors, and shippers.
Where Is TriumphPay Taking the Industry?
With our recent addition of Schneider to the Payments Network, we now have 80 brokers and 20 factors on the Network. As we continue to expand the volume of conforming transactions and structured data that flows through the network, TriumphPay will enhance the ability to verify and validate load data.
Within TriumphPay’s network, verification and validation are foundational, and the more brokers and factors join, the more accurate we can be. The payments network helps brokers work better with factors when historically, it’s been a tumultuous relationship.
TriumphPay is working to make the payments process for the transportation industry easier, safer, and more efficient, removing the burden of back-office administration and payments from brokers and factors. In the coming months, there will be many announcements that will help on-network brokers minimize risk, increase efficiency, and scale their business without increasing overhead.
We feel strongly about our mission to lead the charge against fraud, replacing the trust-but-verify model with modern technology, powering a secure and modern payments process for years to come.
