On June 24th, members of IBAO’s administrative team participated in the North York Relay for Life. The IBAO team raised over $30,000.00 for the Canadian Cancer Society’s annual Relay.

Relay For Life is an overnight non-competitive relay that celebrates cancer survivors and pays tribute to loved ones. It's a night of fun, friendship and fundraising to beat cancer.

This year’s Relay took place at the Esther Shriner Stadium in Toronto where IBAO was joined by countless other teams, all participating for this incredible cause.

IBAO is extremely proud to support the Canadian Cancer Society’s crusade and looks forward to continuing that support for years to come.

While no one is immune from cheque fraud, companies that maintain large cash balances and process a large volume of cheques, such as those in the insurance industry, are popular targets of fraudsters. Fraudsters seem to be well in tune with our industry and perpetrate fraud in a number of ways, including stealing blank cheques, or intercepting written cheques in transit and altering the amount or payee, or outright counterfeiting cheques.

In order to protect your brokerage, internal controls must form the first line of defense. Here are a few tips:

• Implement physical security by properly securing and restricting access to any computers used to issue cheques, especially ones with electronic signatures.
• Cheques, cheque order forms, and articles of incorporation should be treated as carefully as cash and kept locked up with restricted access.
• Ensure that cheques have serial numbers on the electronic codeline (commonly referred to as MICR).  Most banks’ detection equipment relies on the MICR as part of their fraud detection systems.
• Reconcile accounts on a daily basis (confirming both correct amounts and payees) and separating accounts payable from accounts receivable roles can help minimize opportunities for fraudulent activity.

A secondary line of defense revolves around various industry products such as modern cheque printers with security features like watermarks. Also, there are a number of banking products and services such as positive pay, electronic reconciliation, and electronic payments direct to the payee can help mitigate the risk of cheque fraud.

If you believe that some fraudulent activity is at work, contact your banker immediately.

For more information, on how to minimize your brokerage’s fraud risk, visit the fraud section of the BMO website, or read the article on cheque fraud in the June issue of The Ontario Broker.