U.S. businesses are more worried about payment fraud than they were a year ago, but most of their employees say they are not equipped to stop it, according to new research commissioned by Eftsure, a company that sells payment-verification software to corporate finance teams.
The survey, released Monday, found that 55 percent of employees feel more exposed to financial fraud than they did 12 months ago, and 59 percent do not feel fully prepared to identify modern payment scams. Only 23 percent said their organization uses dedicated fraud or account-monitoring tools, and only 33 percent said they had received clear, practical training on how to identify and stop payment fraud.
The sharpest concern was about artificial intelligence: 76 percent of respondents said they are worried about AI-assisted scams, including fake invoices and AI-generated fraud attempts.
Where the process breaks
The findings point to a specific weak spot. When a supplier asks to change the bank account that receives its payments, a request that is a standard setup for business email compromise, 29 percent of employees said they are unsure what their organization expects them to do. Only 35 percent said their company independently verifies such requests by calling the vendor on a trusted phone number.
Confidence in the surrounding controls was low as well. Sixty-nine percent of respondents were not fully confident that their vendors and business partners have adequate systems to prevent payment fraud and cybercrime, and only 27 percent believe their own organization monitors for payment fraud continuously rather than through periodic checks.
A leadership gap
The research also found that workplace hierarchy plays a role. Seventy-two percent of respondents did not fully believe their senior leaders understand how modern payment fraud happens or what it can cost, and only 31 percent said they would feel completely comfortable questioning a payment request that came from a senior colleague. Fraudsters routinely impersonate executives for exactly that reason.
"Fraudsters are constantly evolving their tactics, but many businesses are still relying on processes and controls that simply weren't designed for today's threat landscape," said Ramesh Menon, Eftsure's chief product officer. "Modern payment fraud exploits uncertainty, manual workflows, and human psychology. Leadership has a strong role to play in driving fraud prevention, by emphasizing strong verification practices, ongoing monitoring and practical employee education."
The company also cited Gartner research suggesting that only about 4 percent of technology leaders consider their data ready for AI, an argument that the same weaknesses will matter more as finance teams automate the processes that move money.
What the survey does not say
Eftsure did not disclose the survey's sample size, the dates it was fielded, or who conducted it, which makes the figures harder to compare with other fraud research. The company has a commercial interest in the result: it describes itself as "the independent trust layer for enterprise finance" and sells software that verifies payees before funds are released. It says it safeguards hundreds of billions of dollars in business-to-business payments a year across more than 40 jurisdictions, and it expanded into the U.S. market through its acquisition of Relish.
Even allowing for the source, the practical recommendations are the ones security teams have made for years: verify bank-detail changes through a known phone number rather than email, monitor payments continuously, and make it normal for any employee to challenge a payment request regardless of who sent it.