Solving the problem of B2B payment vulnerability

Over the past decade, B2C payments have become effortless and secure. Bit by bit, companies have removed points of friction, ensuring that consumers pay businesses for purchases quickly and safely.

 

But the same can’t be said for B2B payments, where a business pays another business for goods or services. Issues around fraud and internal collusion persist. Meanwhile, the fact that the B2B payment process is still very manual means that human errors continue to creep in, undermining trust between a business and its vendors and suppliers.

 

In the US, for instance, 84 percent of enterprise companies were the target of B2B payment fraud attacks and attempts in 2022. Human errors are also proving costly: US businesses estimate that anywhere between 1 and 3 percent of their budgets are lost every year due to errors in vendor and supplier payments.

 

B2B payments struggle for a number of reasons. Businesses often manage hundreds, if not thousands, of vendors with often hundreds of thousands of invoices to pay, which places a significant strain on accounts payable and finance teams.

 

Communications channels are also vulnerable to attacks by bad actors seeking to divert payments, with a high volume of communication going through unsecured channels, like email and phone.

 

The way that businesses are structured is also a problem. Even within accounts payable departments, teams can be siloed, and/or the process can involve multiple people working across multiple teams, contributing to a lack of full visibility and oversight.

 

 

“The reason why bad actors like to attack the business payment process is because, for them, it is super easy to compromise and steal the organisation’s funds,” says Shai Gabay, Co-founder and CEO of Trustmi, a business payment security platform that works with businesses to ensure their B2B payments are secure and their bottom line protected.

 

Part of the problem comes with verifying the identity of the payment recipient, and determining whether or not the right payment reached the right person or vendor.

 

To do that work you need a large body of data, but for many organisations, their data is managed in legacy systems and a complex matrix of spreadsheets that are difficult to maintain.

 

The result is that they cannot ensure full protection from fraud and errors across the entire B2B payment process.

 

As cases of fraud and cyberattack mounted, Trustmi looked closely at the complexity of the B2B payment process and recognised that a core challenge in finding a solution was how to connect different sources of data to build a coherent picture. 

 

“We’re connecting the entire flow – from the email, procurement, onboarding; all those different parts – and leveraging historical data to extract a lot of features,” Gabay explains of its end-to-end solution.

 

“And we’re using AI to assemble a digital fingerprint of each vendor and create a baseline that determines which activities and behaviours are legitimate and which are not.”

 

 

The past decade has shown that businesses often struggle with technology. Despite the now unavoidable need for organisations to undergo digital transformation, many are still resistant, citing lack of confidence in new tech, and the disruptions caused by making the transition.

 

The result is that many organisations still rely on manual processes – even when it comes to payments.

 

Trustmi is only too aware of this. As it set about designing a secure and frictionless B2B payment solution, it kept a close eye not just on useability, but on how seamlessly it could be integrated and adopted.

 

“We first understand how an organisation is conducting its B2B payment, and we make sure that our solution is not only going to be very simple and fast, but also that it won’t change the way the organisation does their business,” Gabay says.

 

“Instead of doing a lot of manual work and looking in a lot of different systems to try to verify each payment, we give you one point of view.

 

“Everything is available for you,” he continues. “You have an AI engine that basically verifies everything and can provide payment accuracy and protect your bottom line.” 

 

 

If fraud and cyberattacks are to be prevented, a holistic view of a business’s payment process is required. Connecting the dots across silos helps to reveal vulnerabilities across the entire payment flow.

 

This is what Trustmi has pioneered in a space that urgently needs it. It sees itself not just as an end-to-end solution provider, but also as a partner to businesses, one that understands their unique needs and responds to them.