Vendor payments are supposed to be routine. Predictable. Maybe even boring.
Fraud makes them anything but.
In many organizations, accounts payable still runs on a patchwork of email requests, spreadsheet tracking, manual invoice entry and approvals that depend on who’s available (and how convincing the message sounds). That’s a problem, because vendor fraud doesn’t need to break your systems to work; it just needs to slip through your process.
And it’s slipping through everywhere. In the 2025 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, 79% of organizations reported attempted or actual payments fraud activity in 2024. Meanwhile, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported $2.77B in Business Email Compromise losses in 2024, a scheme that often starts with an “urgent” vendor bank-change email.
The good news: you don’t have to “outsmart” every fraudster. You just need controls that make fraud hard to execute and easy to detect.
This is another way payment automation earns its keep: not as a shiny workflow upgrade, but as a practical layer of vendor risk management.
Fraud in vendor transactions usually falls into a few repeatable patterns. If your process is manual, each pattern has a natural advantage.
A fraudster (external or internal) changes a vendor’s bank details, address or contact info, then routes legitimate payments to the wrong account. Sometimes it’s a brand-new fake vendor. Sometimes it’s a real vendor with “updated” remittance info.
Manual risk factor: changes come through email, get keyed in by hand and approvals are informal (“Looks fine to me”).
BEC doesn’t look like “hacking.” It looks like pressure:
This tactic keeps working at scale. IC3’s data shows BEC is still driving billions in losses.
Common examples:
Manual risk factor: invoice review is time-constrained, and duplicate detection is often visual (which is another way of saying: unreliable).
When approvals happen via email, chat or a quick desk drop-by, it’s hard to prove who approved what and easy for a fraudster to impersonate an approver.
Manual risk factor: exceptions become normal, especially when teams are understaffed.
Think of payment automation as a system that replaces “best effort” controls with default controls. The best platforms speed things up and make it harder to do risky things quietly.
Vendor risk management starts before the first invoice hits your desk.
With automation, vendor onboarding can require structured data (not free-form email), plus verification steps and documentation that live in one place. More importantly, it can enforce rules for vendor changes, where fraud often happens.
Fraud-resistant vendor validation practices automation supports:
This reduces the chance that someone can “just update it real quick” and move on.
Most teams already believe in segregation of duties. The challenge is enforcing it when the process lives in email.
Payment automation can route approvals based on:
What changes in practice:
And when risk needs extra friction, like a vendor bank change, you can require it.
Vendor fraud loves irreversible payment methods and rushed release cycles.
Automation helps by adding guardrails at the moment money leaves your account:
It also helps teams shift away from high-risk workflows. For example, AFP’s survey highlights that checks remain a major fraud target, with a large share of organizations reporting check fraud attempts.
The broader point: when payments are controlled through a single system, you reduce the number of “side doors.”
Fraud thrives in ambiguity. Audit trails remove ambiguity.
A strong automation platform creates a clear record of:
That matters because fraud can persist for months before it’s detected. ACFE reports that a typical fraud case lasts about 12 months before detection and estimates that organizations lose 5% of revenue to fraud each year.
You can’t control what you can’t see, and you can’t prove what you can’t trace.
If you want a practical starting point, use this as a simple internal assessment. The more “no” answers you have, the more your current process relies on vigilance instead of controls.
Payment automation is not a replacement for strong policies, but it makes strong policies livable.
A good operating model usually includes:
When these three align, fraud prevention stops being a heroic effort and becomes a repeatable system.
If you’re responsible for AP, treasury, finance leadership, IT or risk, here’s a practical way to move forward:
If you want deeper reading as you evaluate options, these REPAY resources can help:
How does payment automation prevent vendor fraud?
It reduces vendor fraud by enforcing vendor validation, routing approvals with role-based controls and creating audit trails that expose suspicious changes and exceptions.
What is vendor master file fraud?
It’s when someone creates a fake vendor or changes a real vendor’s details (often bank info) so payments go to the wrong destination.
Why is Business Email Compromise so effective against AP?
Because it targets process gaps — such as urgent requests, informal approvals and bank changes handled through email — rather than exploiting technical vulnerabilities.
What controls matter most for vendor bank changes?
Dual approval, out-of-band verification (not replying to the same email thread) and an auditable record of who made the change and why.
Does automation help with audits?
Yes. It centralizes documentation and produces a consistent record of approvals, changes and payment release activity, reducing audit scramble and improving traceability.
What’s a good first step if we’re not ready to automate everything?
Start with bank-change controls and approval enforcement. Those two areas often reduce the highest-risk fraud scenarios fastest.