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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.

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.

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.

Creative agencies sit in the middle of one of the worst-paid sectors in the UK. Brand clients pay late. Agencies absorb the cost. Freelancers and production partners absorb whatever is left. The problem is not moral but structural, and it becomes addressable once payment behaviour across the agency supply chain is observable.

Construction has carried late payment for decades. Long contractor chains, retention practices and certification cycles produce structural lateness that compounds down the chain. The UK Industry Benchmark shows the sector sitting clearly in the bottom quartile. Here are the interventions that actually move the needle and the ones that have not.

Accountants and bookkeepers sit on top of the work that an AP network removes. Re-keying supplier data, chasing missing details, fielding 'is this real' questions on every client. Pushing clients onto a network turns a margin-eating workload into a defensible service line, with fewer fraud incidents on the practice's watch and cleaner books across the portfolio.

Monthly accounts payable is a closing cadence, not an operating one. It misses behaviour drift mid-period, lets fraud signals age out, and turns supplier disputes into structural problems before anyone sees them. Continuous AP changes the cadence by changing the data source. Here is what it looks like in practice and the maturity ladder to get there.

Supplier trust used to live with procurement and supplier payment used to live with finance. That split is now the single largest source of operational and fraud risk in mid-market AP. Here are three operating models for 2026, the trade-offs of each, and a RACI that closes the seam without forcing a reorganisation.