Key takeaway: AI-based fraud defense is becoming standard practice in corporate treasury, not an early-adopter experiment. But check fraud and manual reconciliation still expose merchants and processors to legacy fraud risk that AI tools haven’t closed off. For merchants managing their own outgoing B2B payments, that gap is where losses are most likely to slip through.
Forty-two percent of corporate finance departments now run a stack of three or more AI tools to secure their outgoing payments. That’s according to a PYMNTS Intelligence and Bottomline study that surveyed 150 treasury and finance executives.
The study, “Prevention First: Building a Smarter Defense Against Payments Fraud,” found that older fraud problems persist even as AI adoption grows. Thirty-five percent of businesses surveyed still encounter traditional check fraud. Seventy-eight percent say manual reconciliation work remains a burden on their teams. Treasury teams are pairing automated risk scoring and real-time bank account validation with multi-person approval workflows. They use these tools to catch suspicious wire transfers and confirm payee identities before funds move, the study found.
Among companies that haven’t yet adopted dedicated fraud-detection tools, 58% plan to add them within the next 12 months. Meanwhile, 75% of companies that already have AI-based defenses in place plan to expand that investment further.
Why it matters: The persistence of check fraud and manual reconciliation shows merchants and processors are still carrying legacy fraud exposure that AI tools haven’t fully closed off, even as layered AI defense becomes the norm.
Source: PYMNTS
