David Davis, the lawyer and founder of the firm Davis Cyber Law, brings over three decades of legal practice and a specialized master’s in cyber-law to the challenge of organizational fraud prevention. In an era where technology, finance, and identity converge, his approach emphasizes professionalizing anti-fraud controls rather than relying on ad-hoc patchwork fixes. With a focus on mapping value flows, clarifying ownership of risk, and automating routine monitoring, he argues that businesses of all sizes can shift from reactive firefighting to managed discipline.
Why a Professionalized Approach Beats Ad Hoc Fixes
Fraud rarely appears as a single dramatic event. It tends to accumulate through small gaps that no one formally owns, a dormant account with elevated rights, a rushed vendor setup without bank verification, or a finance user who approves and books the same payment.
Professional anti-fraud programs close these seams by assigning clear ownership, documenting controls, and measuring performance. The practical advantage is speed. When roles, playbooks, and thresholds are known in advance, teams resolve exceptions quickly and escalate only what matters.
Repeatability is another advantage, and programs that codify how invoices are validated, how user access is reviewed, and how alerts are triaged generate data that leaders can analyze. That feedback loop supports smarter thresholds, tighter whitelists, and better training. Over time, false positives fall while true positives surface earlier in the loss curve.
“Precision matters in fraud work,” says David Davis, lawyer. “You want controls that are tight enough to stop abuse and light enough to keep the business moving.”
Technology helps, but only after you understand where value moves through the organization. A quick, structured walkthrough of procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, payroll, and expense processes will reveal where trust is assumed and where verification is missing.
This mapping is where you align finance and security. Payment controls that live only in accounting software become porous if email security and identity management are weak. Likewise, a perfect single sign-on cannot save a payables process that accepts last-minute bank changes by email. A shared risk register ensures both teams see the same exposure and share the same remediation plan.
Controls protect assets in a few key ways. Some prevent bad actions outright. Others detect unusual activity quickly. The third group preserves evidence to support root-cause analysis and, if needed, recovery.
Preventive controls start with segregation of duties and role-based access. No single person should be able to create a vendor, approve payment, and reconcile the bank file. Access should be timebound, least privilege, and reviewed at set intervals. Multi-factor authentication, strong password policies, and device hygiene extend the same discipline to identity.
Detective controls rely on data. Transaction-monitoring rules that flag round-dollar invoices, weekend payments, sequential invoice numbers, or rapid refunds surface outliers that merit a second look. Email security layers that quarantine look-alike domains reduce the odds of business email compromise.
Log retention across ERP, banking portals, and identity providers ensures that when something slips through, you can reconstruct what happened. Finally, evidentiary controls make your program auditable. Dated approvals, screen captures of vendor verification, and tamper-evident logs create a trail that supports incident response, insurance claims, or legal action.
“Good documentation is not bureaucracy but instead how you prove diligence, learn from events, and recover faster,” notes Davis.
Close the Big Three: Phishing, Vendor Fraud, Insider Misuse
Phishing is still the most common entry point for account takeover and wire redirection. A professional program treats it as a behaviour problem addressed with layered defences. Technical layers include advanced email filtering, domain-based message authentication, and browser isolation for unknown links. Behavioural layers include short, frequent training, clear escalation paths, and rules that require out-of-band verification for urgent payment changes.
Vendor fraud exploits weak onboarding and change management. Require bank validation through a trusted, pre-recorded contact, never through reply-to details in a change request. Lock down who can modify vendor master data and automatically notify a second approver when changes occur. Use cooling-off periods for first payments to new beneficiaries above a set threshold and sample-test new vendors monthly.
Insider misuse is sensitive but manageable. Apply background checks appropriate to the role, remove access promptly on exit, and rotate duties in high-risk teams to deter familiarity-driven shortcuts. Pair behavioural analytics with a clear policy so reviews focus on truly unusual activity, not normal productivity. Reinforce a speak-up culture where concerns are logged without retaliation and where leadership follows the same rules as everyone else.
Transaction monitoring, identity governance, and email security are well-suited to automation. Connect your accounting platform and bank feeds to an analytics layer that scores payments by risk indicators. Tune rules for your patterns rather than relying on generic templates. Start with a small set of high-yield alerts, measure precision, and expand only when signal-to-noise is stable.
On the identity side, automate provisioning from HR systems, expire temporary roles by default, and schedule recertifications. Pair these steps with conditional access policies so sensitive functions require stronger assurance factors. For communications, implement domain protection and enforce warnings for external senders, especially on mobile where visual cues are weaker.
Automation should also simplify evidence. Store verification artifacts, approvals, and reconciliations in a central, write-once repository tied to the transaction ID. That design shortens investigations and eliminates email archaeology.
Train Little, Train Often, and Measure
Training that arrives once a year is forgotten by the next morning. Effective programs deliver short sessions tied to real workflows, five minutes on how to verify a bank change, three minutes on spotting look-alike domains, ten minutes on using the incident intake form. Pair lessons with quick checks to measure retention and adapt content. Recognize teams that surface near-misses. The goal is confidence, people should know what to do when something feels off.
Leaders matter here. When executives follow the same playbook and acknowledge submissions that prevented a loss, norms shift. Over time, the culture becomes watchful and calm, not fearful.
“The most resilient teams make prevention part of everyday work. They treat controls like seatbelts. Always on, and rarely in the way,” says Davis.
Controls decay without maintenance. Commit to a cadence that includes monthly reconciliations and exception reviews, quarterly internal audits of high-risk processes, and annual third-party assessments that test social engineering and control design. Transparency keeps momentum and earns trust with boards, customers, and regulators.
Incident response should be rehearsed. Tabletop scenarios that walk through a wire diversion, a payroll reroute, or a compromised email account reveal gaps long before a real event. Keep vendor, bank, and law-enforcement contacts current. Decide in advance who talks to whom and what evidence to collect first. Preparation lowers both financial and reputational damage.
Professional anti-fraud strategies for small business security work best when they are simple to understand, consistent to apply, and measured over time. Map where value moves, install balanced controls, automate the routine, train continuously, and test on a schedule. These habits reduce losses, speed recoveries, and build durable trust. Most importantly, they turn fraud work from episodic firefighting into a managed discipline that scales with the business.
