If you’ve ever sat through an AP team meeting where half the conversation is about a payment that got flagged, delayed, or — worst case — never arrived because it was intercepted by fraudsters, you already know the tension we’re talking about.

Security slows things down. Efficiency opens things up. And somehow, your finance team is supposed to thread that needle every single day.

Here’s the thing though: those two goals don’t have to be at war with each other. The companies getting this right aren’t choosing one over the other — they’re rethinking how their payment infrastructure works altogether. Let’s break down what that actually looks like.

Why is enterprise payment fraud getting worse?

The fraud numbers are rough right now, and they’re not trending in a reassuring direction.

According to AFP, 76% of organizations reporting they experienced attempted or actual fraud in 2025 (AFP, 2025). That’s not a niche problem — that’s the vast majority of companies. A large portion of that came from business email compromise (BEC) and vendor-spoofing scams — the kind that go straight after your AP workflows. Also concerning is the growing threat of AI-enabled fraud and deepfakes.

At the same time, enterprise finance teams are under pressure to move faster. Vendors want early payment options. Executives want real-time visibility. Procurement wants payment approvals in hours, not days. When security measures create friction — multi-step approvals, manual verification calls, holds on new vendor payments — people start looking for workarounds. And workarounds are where fraud lives.

So the question isn’t “how do we lock everything down?” It’s “how do we build a payment system that’s genuinely secure and doesn’t slow down our team?”

What causes the tension between payment security and efficiency?

Most of the friction in enterprise payments comes down to a few specific pain points.

Manual approval chains. The more humans you add to a payment workflow, the more opportunities there are for delays and for human error. The downstream cost of those delays adds up fast. According to PYMNTS, for middle-market companies, slow payments translate to roughly $19 million in lost revenue each year, and nearly 30% of invoices go unpaid every month, more than five times the rate seen in healthy financial ecosystems. Manual-only processes simply can’t keep up with the volume or sophistication of today’s threats, which is exactly why so many finance teams are pushing toward automation.

Outdated controls. Fraudsters today are using AI to write convincing phishing emails, generate fake invoices, and impersonate vendors with remarkable accuracy. Controls built five years ago weren’t designed for that environment.

Fragmented visibility. When your team can’t see the full picture of what’s moving through the system, they either over-approve (efficiency win, security loss) or over-flag everything (security win, efficiency nightmare). Neither is sustainable at scale.

How can companies reduce payment fraud without slowing down operations?

The companies that have figured this out tend to share a few things in common.

Automate routine payments, scrutinize the unusual ones

Not every payment carries the same risk. A recurring vendor you’ve paid 40 times looks very different from a new international wire to someone you’ve never worked with. Smart automation — powered by AI and machine learning — can handle the low-risk payments quickly and surface the high-risk ones for closer review.

The results speak for themselves. According to Mastercard, 42% of card issuers and 26% of acquirers have each saved more than $5 million in fraud losses over the past two years thanks to AI — and 83% say it has meaningfully cut down on false positives that slow down legitimate transactions. That’s the goal — fewer bad transactions getting through, and fewer legitimate ones getting stuck.

What are virtual cards, and do they actually help with fraud prevention?

Yes, significantly. Virtual cards are single-use card numbers generated for a specific transaction and a specific dollar amount. If someone intercepts the number after the fact, there’s nothing they can do with it — the transaction is already closed.

Build controls around the payment itself, not just who approved it

Traditional controls focus on who approves a payment. Modern controls should also look at the payment itself — is this vendor in your approved list? Does the amount match the PO? Is the bank account the same one you’ve used before? Has anything changed recently on this vendor’s profile?

Tokenization fits here too. By replacing sensitive payment data with tokens, you reduce what’s exposed at every step in the transaction chain. It’s not a coincidence that tokenization now accounts for roughly 30% of the payment security market (Mordor Intelligence) — it works.

Centralize your payment data

Fragmented payment systems are a security and efficiency problem at the same time. When data lives in five different platforms, your team spends time chasing it down and your security team can’t spot patterns across the organization.

Centralizing payment operations — even partially — gives you better visibility into anomalies and vendor relationships. It also means your controls can actually work as designed, rather than being applied inconsistently depending on which system a payment runs through.

What is PCI DSS 4.0 and how does it affect enterprise payment teams?

There’s another layer here that finance leaders can’t afford to ignore: the regulatory environment has gotten more demanding.

PCI DSS 4.0 became mandatory in March 2025 and introduced 64 new requirements covering things like continuous log analysis and payment-page script integrity. For Level 1 enterprises, annual compliance costs can climb to $250,000 — and non-compliance fines can hit up to $500,000 per month (Mordor Intelligence, 2026).

The silver lining: the controls that satisfy a PCI audit are often the same ones that make your payment operations run more smoothly. Security investment and operational improvement aren’t as separate as they might seem.

Where should you start?

If all of this feels like a lot to tackle at once, that’s understandable. A practical starting point is a payment risk assessment — mapping out your highest-risk payment types, where you have manual gaps, and where you have the least visibility.

From there, the goal is a layered approach. In practice, that could mean stacking tools that each do a specific job — multi-factor authentication to verify who’s actually approving a payment, real-time transaction monitoring to flag anything that looks off, virtual cards to lock down individual transactions by vendor and amount, AP automation to reduce the manual touchpoints where errors and fraud tend to creep in, and address verification to catch mismatches before a payment clears. No single one of those is enough on its own, but together they may close the gaps that fraudsters look for. 

For more insights and updates on corporate payments, check out:

• Your guide to virtual card rebates
• How to create an anti-fraud culture
• 2026 business payment trends

The information in this blog post is for educational purposes only. It is not legal, tax or investment advice. For legal, tax or investment advice, you should consult your own legal counsel, tax, and investment advisers.

Copyright ©2026 WEX Inc. All rights reserved. The information in this document is subject to change without notice.