Ringback

Idea

Ringback turns the informal "call them back to confirm" fraud check into software a small business can't skip. It gives the one bookkeeper or office manager at a small company a verified vendor and executive contact directory, a rotating SMS code word, and a callback workflow that has to be completed before a bank-detail change or urgent wire request can be marked cleared. Every step gets logged for the owner, the accountant, and the cyber insurer.

Market gap

AI voice cloning needs three seconds of audio and turns "call to confirm" into a hollow ritual, because the fraudster can now sound exactly like the boss on the phone too. FinCEN's advisory already found fraudulent vendor and invoice impersonation is the single most common business email compromise method. The businesses getting hit hardest are the ones with one person who can authorize a wire on a boss's say-so: a small manufacturer, a small contractor, a small professional services firm. Every fraud-prevention product built for this problem is priced and integrated for a company with a treasury department, or it only covers real estate closings. Nobody has built the callback discipline into software for the business that has neither.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Bottom-up:

• The US has roughly 6 million employer firms (Census 2021 SUSB, via Pew Research). 27 percent have 5 to 19 employees and 8 percent have 20 to 99 employees, so about 35 percent, roughly 2.1 million firms, sit in the "one bookkeeper, no treasury team" band this product targets.
• TAM: 2.1 million firms x a blended $1,800 average annual contract value (mix of the three tiers below) = approximately $3.78 billion.
• SAM: FinCEN's advisory puts manufacturing and construction at 25 percent of reported BEC cases and commercial services at 18 percent, with wholesale/distribution and professional/healthcare practices making up much of the rest. Assume 40 percent of the 2.1 million firms are in industries with material recurring vendor wire or ACH activity: 840,000 firms x $1,800 = approximately $1.51 billion.
• SOM: a realistic 3-year self-serve capture of 0.3 percent of SAM, about 2,520 customers x $1,800 = approximately $4.5 million ARR.
• Assumption stated: average contract value skews toward the $199/month Growth tier, since that tier includes the two-person approval workflow most insurers will eventually want to see documented.

Monetization strategy

Straight subscription SaaS, billed monthly or annually, paid by the business itself. The customer is the bookkeeper or office manager who sets it up, but the owner or controller is who feels the value: fewer sleepless nights over a wire that already went out. Renewal is sticky for two reasons. First, protection stops the moment access lapses, since new vendors keep getting added and code words keep needing to rotate. Second, cyber insurance underwriters increasingly ask small businesses to document a payment-verification control, and Ringback's exportable audit log is the answer to that question. A future expansion (not in MVP scope) is a multi-client plan sold to outsourced bookkeeping and accounting firms who want the same control across every client they touch.

Pricing strategy

• Starter, $79/month: up to 25 verified contacts, 1 user, SMS code-word delivery, 90-day audit log. The entry point for the single-bookkeeper business.
• Growth, $199/month (anchor): up to 100 verified contacts, 5 users, two-person approval on flagged requests, 3-year audit log retention, exportable compliance reports for cyber insurance underwriting.
• Scale, $399/month: unlimited contacts and users, custom code-word rotation schedule, priority SMS routing, API access for accounting-software webhooks, dedicated onboarding call.
• Annual billing gets 2 months free on every tier.
• Rationale: this sits at roughly a tenth of enterprise AP fraud platform pricing, and every tier costs less than a rounding error next to the FBI's reported $123,000 average BEC loss per incident, so the ROI argument makes itself.

Lead magnet

A free, no-signup Vendor Fraud Exposure Calculator: enter how many vendors get paid by wire or ACH each month and the average payment size, and it returns an estimated annual dollar exposure using FBI IC3 and AFP survey base rates. It also unlocks an instant downloadable one-page Callback Verification Policy PDF with a starter code-word protocol the visitor can start using by hand today, whether or not they ever sign up.

Social proof that the problem exists

1. FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report: business email compromise caused $3.047 billion in reported losses across 24,768 incidents in 2025, averaging about $123,000 per case. https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf
2. FinCEN's updated advisory on email compromise fraud found fraudulent vendor and client invoices grew to become the most common BEC method, and named manufacturing/construction (25 percent of cases) and commercial services (18 percent) as top target industries, the exact small-business segment this product serves. https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/updated-advisory-email-compromise-fraud-schemes-targeting-vulnerable-business
3. CNN's reporting on the Arup engineering firm shows the mechanism at full scale: a finance employee wired $25.6 million after a video call where every face and voice was an AI deepfake of real executives. Small businesses face the same tactic with far less to lose before it hurts. https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/tech/arup-deepfake-scam-loss-hong-kong-intl-hnk
4. The 2025 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey found 60 percent of organizations cite vendor impersonation as a primary attack vector, and third-party impersonation is now the most common BEC scam type. https://www.truist.com/content/dam/truist-bank/us/en/documents/info/cci/2025-afp-payments-fraud-control-survey-report-key-highlights.pdf
5. Industry guidance aimed specifically at small businesses describes why they're uniquely exposed: a single bookkeeper or office manager who can act on the owner's direct instruction is exactly what voice-cloning fraud is built to exploit, and the only defense offered today is a manual callback habit, not software. https://www.sequentur.com/voice-cloning-and-deepfakes-the-new-business-fraud-you-need-to-know-about

Competitors

• CertifID and Closinglock: wire-instruction verification with insurance-backed recovery, but built and sold exclusively for real estate closings (title agents, lenders, buyers, sellers).
• Trustpair: enterprise accounts-payable fraud prevention that validates vendor bank accounts against banking-network data, sold to treasury and finance teams and integrated into SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, and Workday.
• Eftsure: continuous vendor bank-detail monitoring aimed at the same enterprise finance-team buyer, with a callback-control-procedure template it publishes as content but doesn't operationalize for a company too small to have a procedure owner.
• Nasdaq Verafin: anti-financial-crime detection sold to banks, not directly to small business end customers.

What competitors offer now

The real-estate tools stop at property closings and don't touch ordinary vendor payments. The enterprise AP platforms assume an ERP to plug into and a procurement or treasury function to administer the tool, a sales-assisted motion with pricing to match. What's left for the 5-to-99-employee business is a blog post, a static policy PDF, or a training video telling the bookkeeper to call the vendor back on a number "from an independent source." None of it is enforced. There's no product that stops a payment from clearing until the callback actually happened.

What can be done differently to attract customers

Sell to the bookkeeper, not the CFO, since the bookkeeper is both the point of attack and the one who has to do the calling. Enter through the free exposure calculator and policy template so the visitor gets real value before ever giving an email address. Price for a 10-minute self-serve setup with no ERP integration, sitting alongside whatever accounting software the business already runs instead of replacing it. Distribute through QuickBooks ProAdvisor communities, bookkeeper associations, and the cyber insurance brokers who sell policies to these exact businesses and want fewer claims, rather than competing for the same enterprise treasury conference budget Trustpair and Eftsure already own.