With great payment power comes great responsibility. Online payments are subject to a host of cybersecurity considerations and legislations, and these are especially stringent in the legal industry. Whether it’s a case of someone accessing sensitive data or hijacking your emails to send clients fraudulent bank details, cybersecurity breaches can be of huge financial and reputational damage to your law firm.
If you want to avoid that, here are five of our top tips for improving the security of online payments in your law firm.
1. Comply with PCI
While online payments are infinitely more secure than taking payments over the phone, you still need to ensure that your payment software of choice is PCI compliant. This means any transfers you receive are encrypted in transit, and that this is a regulatory requirement.
2. Host it securely
When integrating an online payment system, take care to host it in a secure environment with all the correct safeguards in place. Not sure if you’re safe? Look for a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate to confirm whether your data exchange is encrypted.
3. Double down on authentication
You can’t protect against data loss and fraudulent transactions without Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). Make sure that SCA is enabled for all digital payments – it’s convenient for your customer as well as safe.
4. Be responsible with your customers’ data
You don’t need to see your client’s full card information, and you shouldn’t be writing that down or processing that information manually. With a good payment processor, your client’s card data will be encrypted so that your finance team only sees the last four digits of the card number and the type of card they paid on. Trust goes both ways, after all.
5. Train your staff
Employees can be your biggest asset in combating cyber threats, but they can also be your biggest weakness. Only 64% of UK organisations provide formal cybersecurity training to their employees, but studies show that effective training can reduce the risk to an organisation by 70%.
How can Legl help?
Legl’s payment solution helps law firms to:
Improve cash flow
Legl provides a variety of options for how, where and when clients can pay what they owe.
Reduce administrative tasks
The Legl platform can automate reminders for overdue payments and send automatic, firm-branded email receipts.
Enable faster payments reconciliation
Law firms can identify what money has come into the firm and from whom it was sent, and link payments to other processes (e.g. CDD/KYC).
Interested in seeing how Legl could work for your firm? Schedule a personalised demo with us now!
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