Can Payroll and Benefits Debits Reveal Businesses Operating out of a Consumer Account?

In last week’s chart, the data showed that financial institutions have businesses with significant monthly expenditures operating out of consumer accounts. Additional analysis found payroll and benefits behavior within the data sample. Payroll and benefits payments are a few types of transactions that can be used to identify businesses masquerading inside retail accounts.  

Overall, 74.6 percent of the businesses found operating out of consumer accounts had payroll payments, averaging $1.6M per year in total. Those accounts had an average of $5.3M in other expenditures.   

Accounts that did not have identified payroll payments still have annual expenditures averaging $3.6M per account. This is likely due to a small business having no employees, or may be an individual gig worker. However, it’s also possible that some businesses in this group may be making payroll from an account at another institution.