Murthy Maddali, Managing Director, West Europe, Techwave
In today’s B2B payment environment, fraud is an evolving threat hiding in plain sight. Enterprises dealing with global vendors, layered approvals, and high-value transfers now face a new class of fraud that is faster, more intelligent, and harder to catch. Traditional systems are falling behind. Payment fraud no longer waits at the perimeter. It is embedded within the daily workflow. A vendor that was verified last quarter now routes payments to an altered account. An invoice arrives that looks identical to past ones but carries a forged tax ID or a mismatched bank code. Fraud has become nuanced, regarded as a major concern among 100% respondents in the UK.
In the United Kingdom alone, 459.7 million pounds were lost to authorised push payment fraud in 2023. These are not just one-off errors. When fraud hits a B2B transaction, the damage is not limited to financial loss. It affects supplier confidence, compliance risk, and audit integrity areas that take years to rebuild once compromised.
Invoice fraud is becoming one of the fastest-growing threats in business payments. It often goes unnoticed because attackers tweak billing details or change how often invoices show up, slipping fake payments past manual checks. Another big issue is when fraudsters hack trusted vendor profiles and quietly switch out the payment details. What makes it worse is that a lot of businesses in the UK, around 64 percent, still handle these processes manually. The frauds are more likely when amounts are smaller and don’t raise red flags. Then comes business email compromise, attackers now mirror internal executives or long-standing vendors with scary precision. The names are familiar, the tone matches, the timing is right, and that is exactly how finance teams get convinced to approve fake payments. Add to that the role of mule accounts, which quickly transfer stolen funds across borders, making recovery extremely difficult.
Despite the increasing complexity of these threats, most fraud prevention tools still focus on consumer-side risks such as card testing or checkout fraud. There remains a major gap in solutions designed specifically for enterprise-scale B2B payments. That gap is where most fraud thrives. The shift to cloud-based infrastructure has enabled real-time data flow, but that alone is not enough. What is urgently needed is intelligent technology that does not just flag errors but understands the pattern. Artificial intelligence brings this capability to life.
At the heart of this transition is the smart fraud detection engine. It is trained using supervised machine learning on anonymized transaction data. It studies patterns, who pays whom, at what time, from what device, using what amounts. If a payment suddenly comes from a high-risk location or an unfamiliar device, or if it deviates from established timing or frequency, the system flags it. That early detection makes all the difference.
The engine also adapts. It cross-validates user behaviour with location data, detecting anomalies that manual reviews would miss. Most importantly, it does this in real time, without slowing down operations.
Alongside intelligent automation, there are simple actions that companies can implement immediately to strengthen defences:
• Do not release payments without complete and verified paperwork
• Flag vendors who suddenly change their banking details
• Separate payment roles so no one individual can initiate and approve payments
• Monitor logins from unfamiliar locations or devices
• Track frequent small payments to new recipients
• Compare invoices against historical records to catch inconsistencies
These safeguards, when paired with adaptive artificial intelligence systems, offer a powerful defence. They reduce false positives while enhancing early fraud detection without interrupting business flow.
Still, adoption remains slow. Even though 76 % of business leaders say AI will be key in fighting fraud, only 43 % have started using it in their payment systems. AI is not the silver bullet, but it is proving to be one of the strongest support systems we have. It helps spot what humans might miss, adapts to new fraud patterns, and takes a lot of pressure off finance teams trying to stay ahead. And even then, most of it is focused on consumer-facing areas, not the back-end processes where a lot of B2B fraud happens. B2B environments, where risks are far greater, remain largely unprotected. Enterprises need to act with urgency. Fraud is not just growing. It is learning. And it is already embedded in processes that were once thought secure. The tools to respond exist. What matters now is prioritising implementation.
