The UK government has confirmed Peppol as the framework behind mandatory B2B and B2G e-invoicing from April 2029. The decision settles how structured invoices will move between businesses. It also reshapes what an accounts payable network needs to do, well before the mandate takes effect.
A change of supplier bank details is the single most exploited moment in accounts payable fraud. Here are five red flags that a request is not genuine, and the simple checks UK finance teams should run before sending money to a new account.
Making Tax Digital and accounts payable are usually treated separately, but they depend on the same thing: clean, digital, well-structured records. Here is how MTD connects to AP, where the overlap with e-invoicing sits, and why getting supplier data right serves both.
UK e-invoicing is moving from consultation towards a mandate, and accounts payable teams that prepare early will treat it as an upgrade rather than a scramble. Here is a practical readiness guide: what is coming, what PEPPOL means in practice, and the steps to take now.
Confirmation of Payee checks whether the account you are about to pay belongs to the supplier you think it does. Here is what the check covers for UK business payments, where it helps most, and the fraud it cannot stop without a verification and monitoring layer behind it.
A sanitised walkthrough of a real AP fraud case. A mid-market firm, a long-standing supplier, a bank-detail switch, and a six-figure loss. Here are the four moments where the fraud could have been caught, what the network layer would have surfaced and when, and the lessons that translate to other businesses.
SME credit decisioning runs on a thin dataset: filed accounts, bureau data, transaction history where available. Payment behaviour from an AP network is one of the strongest forward indicators of distress and recovery, but it has not been available at scale until recently. Here is how lenders are starting to use it and what the consent and governance model looks like.
AP control regimes are calibrated for high-value invoices. The fraud surface that produces most actual losses sits below those thresholds. Small-volume, high-frequency fraud, often automated, dwarfs the headline cases that get reported. Here is why the existing controls miss it and what closes the gap without forcing AP to review every invoice manually.
When buyers and suppliers share data on an AP network, who owns the result? The question is unavoidable as the network model matures, and most competitors will avoid it. Three precedents inform the answer: credit bureaux, open banking and trade associations. None map cleanly. The cooperative model is the most defensible alternative.
The headline figure of £22,000 a year in late-payment cost per UK business is real, citable and defensible. What is less well understood is where that cost actually lands inside the business. Here is the line-item breakdown across financing cost, time cost, fraud exposure and churn, and the proportion that becomes recoverable when behavioural data enters the picture.
