PayStand, the next generation B2B payment and billing company, is leveraging the blockchain in a completely new way for enterprise payments.
PayStand customers now have the option to certify and notarize payments (from request to receipt) on the blockchain to ensure that the history of payments is secure, independently verifiable, and free of tampering.
Typically, certifying payment records are the domain of third party notaries or auditors. The blockchain, however, enables an independent, decentralized and cryptographically secure way to verify that a payment has been made and its information has not been tampered with.
Certifying payments on the blockchain increases the security and audit capabilities that enterprises often must be ready to address. Fraud in trade finance alone accounts for nearly $4 trillion a year, due to exploitable flaws in manual record keeping.
This is crucial for enterprise level payments where the veracity of a payment is required, including title, insurance, supply chain, healthcare, stock transfers, billings, and other mission critical payments.
PayStand leverages a core feature of the blockchain called immutability. When an electronic record is written on the blockchain, it can never be changed. While standard record systems are set up to ensure an audit trail if a record is altered, the practice is only as good as the human controls that enforce it.
On blockchain however, changes are always new entries, and result in a record trail that is secure, certified, and fully auditable. In an era where headlines of corruption occur in far too many industries, immutable records can lead to a much higher degree of transparency and accountability.
Jeremy Almond, CEO, PayStand, says, “Since the founding of the company, PayStand has been a huge believer that blockchain has the ability to radically transform financial services.
Our newest blockchain certification product demonstrates our continued commitment to help enterprises leverage the cutting-edge and digital native technology to improve their payment, invoice, and billing process.”
The way the new product works is simple: Every PayStand customer gets to choose if his or her payments are certified. When they choose to enable certification, every payment request associated to an invoice has a hash of the requested amount and related information.
That hash is confirmed on the blockchain as well as to the sender and recipient. At any time, the sender or recipient can verify the information by clicking on the certificate to make sure the records match what both parties have as well as the permanent and immutable record of the blockchain hash.
All payments take place in local currency such as U.S. dollars and no information is stored on the blockchain, only the certification and audit trail. Once a payment occurs, a receipt is available to both parities. Within that receipt one can click on the certification to see the history and confirmation that the payment occurred and the auditable record that ensures the amount and additional information has not been tampered with. All PayStand customers have access to a dashboard in which they can view the history of all payments and the certified audit trail of each.
Almond continued, “As the world becomes more digital and physical paper trails become less common, we need a way to ensure that payment records have not been modified; blockchain certification is a novel approach. Too often payment records are only as secure as the person who controls them. A blockchain certified payment receipt creates greater trust for all parties, enables added compliance and transparency in the system, makes for better digital tracking, reduces errors, and identifies fraud more easily. There’s no doubt as blockchain moves from the stuff of whitepapers to production systems like this, it will rapidly improve our financial process.”
