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
Business Email Compromise
The Attack That Doesn't Need to Hack Anything Most fraud prevention thinking is organized around technical intrusion — firewalls, endpoint security, multi-factor authentication. Business Email Compromise largely ignores all of it. The most financially damaging form of cyber-enabled payment fraud in the world today does not, in most cases, require the attacker to penetrate a network, plant malware, or exploit a software vulnerability. It requires only a convincing email and an AP or treasury fun
Payment Fraud Prevention Strategies
The Question Is No Longer Whether — It's When Every organization that disburses funds is a target. That is not a rhetorical provocation; it is the operating reality that fraud data consistently confirms. The 2024 Report to the Nations from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that a typical organization loses five percent of its annual revenue to fraud. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that Business Email Compromise alone accounted for more than $3 billion in los
Real Time Payments & Instant Payment Risks
Introduction: The Newest Rail and Its Unforgiving Characteristics Real-time payments are the newest entrant in the organizational disbursement landscape, and they arrive with a risk profile that finance and treasury functions have not fully absorbed. The operational appeal is straightforward and genuine: funds move in seconds, settlement is final, and the rails operate around the clock every day of the year. For time-sensitive vendor payments, emergency disbursements, and counterparties who pla
Virtual Card Payment Controls
Introduction: The Payment Method Marketed as a Control Virtual cards occupy an unusual position in the payment risk landscape. Every other payment method covered in this series — ACH, checks, wire transfers and real-time payments — is evaluated by finance and risk professionals primarily in terms of the fraud exposure it carries. Virtual cards are frequently evaluated in the opposite terms: as a control mechanism, a fraud reduction tool, a way to impose transactional discipline on disbursements
Wire Transfer Fraud Risks
The Highest-Stakes Payment Method in Common Use Wire transfers occupy a unique position in the organizational payment landscape. They are not the most used disbursement method — ACH handles far greater transaction volume, and checks remain more prevalent by number of payments at many organizations. But wire transfers are, by a significant margin, the highest-stakes payment method in routine use. They settle quickly, they are irrevocable upon completion, and they are the preferred endpoint of th