ERP Gaps and Limitations in Payment Controls
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are the backbone of financial operations. They manage invoices, vendors, approvals, and payments. They centralize data and standardize processes. And for many organizations, they represent the single source of truth for financial activity. But when it comes to disbursement controls, there is a growing, and increasingly dangerous, gap between what ERPs were designed to do and what finance leaders need today. That gap is being exploited. Fraud is mo
Continuous Monitoring Systems
For years, accounts payable (AP) controls have been designed around a simple premise: catch issues before or after payments are made. Pre-payment controls aim to prevent fraud and errors. Post-payment audits aim to detect what slipped through. But in today’s environment, where fraud schemes evolve rapidly, payment volumes are rising, and digital channels accelerate transaction speed, that model is no longer sufficient. AP and finance leaders need something more dynamic, more responsive, and m
Overview: Technology for Disbursement Control
Disbursement control has evolved far beyond a back-office function. It is now one of the most critical lines of defense against fraud, financial loss, and compliance failure. As electronic payment volumes grow, fraud schemes become more sophisticated, and regulatory expectations increase, manual processes and fragmented systems simply cannot keep up. Technology is foundational in disbursement control. But deploying technology without a clear framework can lead to the same fragmentation and i
Payment Authorization Best Practices
Payment authorization is one of the most critical control points in the entire disbursement process. It is the moment when an organization decides whether funds should leave the business. If weak authorization controls allow fraudulent, duplicate, inaccurate, or unauthorized payment to move forward, the financial and operational consequences can be significant. Strong payment authorization practices help organizations ensure that every payment is legitimate, properly reviewed, accurately docu
Internal Payment Controls Explained
Internal payment controls are one of the most important safeguards an organization can put in place. Every disbursement represents a moment of risk. Once funds leave the organization, recovering them can be difficult, time-consuming, or impossible. That is why organizations need strong internal controls that ensure every payment is accurate, authorized, legitimate, and properly documented before money moves. Internal payment controls are not just about preventing fraud. They also help reduc
Overview: Payment Controls in Accounts Payable
Payment controls are a business imperative for today’s accounts payable (AP) and finance leaders. AP departments sit at one of the most critical points in the organization’s financial ecosystem: the moment before money leaves the business. Every payment, whether by Automated Clearing House (ACH), wire, virtual card, Real Time Payment (RTP), or check, represents both a business transaction and a potential risk event. Weak controls can lead to duplicate payments, unauthorized disbursements, fraud
AI-Driven Payment Fraud Threats: When the Attack Learns Faster Than the Defense
A New Threat Category — or an Old One Transformed? There is a temptation, when discussing artificial intelligence and fraud, to treat AI-driven threats as a distinct category of attack — something separate from, and in addition to, the BEC schemes, vendor impersonation tactics, account change fraud, and internal risk that the preceding articles in this series addressed. That framing is partly right and importantly wrong. AI has produced at least one genuinely new attack capability that did not
Internal Payment Fraud Risks
The Most Familiar Fraud — and the Most Underestimated When organizations think about payment fraud, their attention has increasingly turned outward — to the BEC attacker crafting a convincing wire request, the vendor impersonator with a forged bank letter, the cybercriminal monitoring an email thread for the right moment to redirect a payment. These external threats are real, well-documented, and rightly treated with urgency. But the fraud that has historically caused the most consistent damage
Bank Account Change Scams: The Last Line — and the Most Broken One
The Simplest Fraud with the Highest Body Count Of all the payment fraud schemes that confront accounts payable and treasury functions, phony bank account change scams are, mechanically, among the simplest. An attacker — posing as a vendor, an employee, or an internal colleague — requests a change to banking information on file. The change is processed without independent verification. The next payment goes to the attacker's account instead of the legitimate recipient. By the time anyone notices
Vendor Impersonation Fraud: How It Works and How to Stop It
The Fraud That Starts Before the Invoice Arrives Vendor impersonation fraud is not a new phenomenon. Organizations have always faced the risk of someone claiming to be a supplier they are not. What has changed is the precision, the scale, and the sophistication of the deception — and the degree to which a threat once associated with unsophisticated schemes has evolved into one of the most technically and operationally advanced forms of payment fraud facing AP functions today. According to the