Insights

The UK Government has announced the toughest crackdown on late payments in over 25 years, increasing reporting requirements, enforcement powers, and scrutiny on large companies. This marks a major shift in how payment behaviour is monitored and enforced, and signals a broader change in how businesses manage suppliers, invoices, and payment performance.

Accounting Links has published new UK benchmark research analysing payment behaviour, accounts payable fraud risk, and supplier exposure across 19 industry sectors. Late payments cost UK businesses an average of £22,000 a year, and AP fraud now affects roughly one in three organisations. This research gives finance teams a clearer picture of how payment performance and fraud risk vary across industries.

Supplier trust scoring marks a shift in UK accounts payable from internal automation to external behavioural infrastructure. By capturing verified payment behaviour, strengthening supplier identity, and enabling network-level trust signals, finance teams can reduce fraud, improve payment transparency, and build financial credibility. The result is a more trusted, data-driven system for managing supplier relationships.

Procure-to-pay visibility is the missing layer in modern finance stacks. Most systems show fragments of the process, but not the full lifecycle from procurement to payment. This article explains why that gap exists, how it impacts cash flow and risk, and what true visibility across P2P actually looks like.

Supplier onboarding has not changed in twenty years. Every buyer collects the same details, verifies the same supplier, and absorbs the same fraud risk in isolation. A connected accounts payable network replaces that closed, static model with verified supplier identities, real-time banking updates, and payment behaviour data shared across the businesses transacting with each other.

Late payments are usually seen as a cash flow decision, but the real cost is operational, behavioural, and systemic. This article explains the hidden cost of late payments that most businesses never measure.

Accounts payable fraud is evolving rapidly as AI tools make invoice manipulation and supplier impersonation easier to execute at scale. Traditional approval workflows and manual checks are no longer enough to prevent fraudulent payments. This article explores how modern invoice fraud works, why existing AP controls fail, and what finance teams need to implement to detect and prevent fraud before payments are made.

Payment terms like Net 30 promise reliability but rarely guarantee it. Discover why SMEs struggle with late payments and how new financial infrastructure can create real payment certainty for suppliers.

Britain's third voluntary code on late payment will fail in the same way as the first two. The structure is sharper, the mechanism is identical, and there is still no cost for non-compliance. The fix is not new legislation. It is connecting existing payment-practice reporting to procurement consequences already on the statute book.

Supplier verification and payment behaviour were historically treated as separate problems. That separation is now creating fraud, inefficiency, and systemic risk. As AI driven impersonation and invoice manipulation rise, finance teams need a unified trust model that combines verified identity with real payment behaviour, continuously and at scale.