Twenty years of B2B payments innovation have skipped two important steps
19 August 2026
by Dan Schonfeld is CFO at ApprovalMax,
Twenty years of B2B payments innovation have skipped two important steps
A business payment is made safe or unsafe long before anyone presses send. Finance teams have to validate that the invoice is real. Then the person with the right authority needs to approve the spend. Those two checks alone decide whether the payment should exist at all. So why, Dan Schonfeld, CFO at ApprovalMax asks, has twenty years of payments innovation focused on another stage entirely?
As a CFO, I’m conscious that the topic of accounts payable will rarely get pulses racing. Nobody has ever built a conference demo around invoice matching. There is no stage at Money20/20 where an expert walks through the moment a purchase order gets checked against a delivery note.
But while it’s a mundane process, it’s the exact stage where a business payment is either recognized as safe, or identified as a risk. Everything after it is execution. And while this execution has been optimised to be as fast, easy and seamless as possible, the decision process behind whether the payment should have gone ahead in the first place, is often lacking.
An invoice that doesn’t match any records, or an approval that comes back as a thumbs up emoji from somebody who may not have the authorization, are not edge cases. For many handling accounts payable, this is a typical working week. And when you consider how vital this stage of money leaving the business is, the more troubling that common scenario becomes.
Twenty years of work on the sending
The payment itself has had an extraordinary amount of attention over the past twenty years, and most of it has paid off.
Settlement has gone from days to seconds. FedNow and RTP have made real-time transfers ordinary in the United States, and the EU has gone as far as obliging providers to offer instant euro transfers as standard rather than as a premium feature.
Verification of the recipient has been built and then mandated. Since 2020 in the UK, the name registered to an account has been checked against the name the payer
typed before a transfer goes anywhere. The EU went further in October 2025, requiring a name check on every euro credit transfer rather than only the instant ones. The United States has no mandated equivalent, although commercial account validation services fill part of that gap.
On the card side, tokenization took the account number out of the transaction altogether, and step-up authentication puts a challenge in front of the payer when something looks unusual. Fraud scoring at the moment of payment has become very good at catching an amount or a location that breaks a pattern.
Every one of those controls examines the payment. None of them examines the decision to pay.
The two checks that decide whether a payment should exist
There are two checks, and neither is technically difficult. What they have in common is that both happen in accounts payable, well before any money moves.
Verification comes first. Somebody has to establish that an invoice corresponds to something the business actually ordered and actually received, at the price that was agreed. Plenty of finance teams have a policy that lays this out. Far fewer have a method that survives a busy month-end. The truth is that a great many pay against the invoice alone, because the supplier name is familiar and the amount looks about right. It is the same risk gap that makes changed bank details such an effective attack. If the only evidence that a supplier's account has moved is the email saying it has moved, then the verification has been handed to whoever sent that email.
Approval comes second. Somebody with the authority to commit the money has to agree to it, which raises the question of who holds that authority and up to what value. In a lot of businesses the answer lives in a dusty policy document. The approval itself often happens by email, Slack or Whatsapp, which records that a person said yes without recording that they were entitled to say it. Twelve months later an auditor asks for evidence of authorization and is handed an email printout.
Yes, neither check is glamorous, and that might be why both get neglected. Technology has concentrated on the payment because that’s where the visible progress is. Finance teams let these important checks slide because a control that is working produces no evidence of having worked. Think about a process - you only know whether it’s good or not when something goes wrong. While these processes are essentially protection, in a busy office, they look and feel like an administrative hindrance.
Where this bites
Very large companies encode approval rules into their finance systems. Very small businesses tend to have one person - usually the owner - who signs everything and knows every supplier personally. Definitely not a control framework, but for the size of the operation, functional.
It’s the businesses that sit in the middle, those with fifty to a few hundred people who are at the most risk. They’ve outgrown the point at which one person can plausibly know every payment, and they cannot justify the cost or the implementation time of enterprise finance software. So they run on habit, email threads, and spreadsheets.
It’s interesting to note that this band is also the segment that business payment 1
providers keep saying they want more of . This means that the fastest payment infrastructure ever built is being connected to the least controlled approvals in the economy.
No accounts payable, no payment
A business payment at its very essence is just an instruction - and that instruction is the output of the accounts payable process. But without a verified invoice there is nothing to pay. And without an approval there is no authority to pay it. The payment should not happen at all until both of those questions have been answered, which makes them part of the payment system, whether or not the payments industry counts them as such.
Treating them as a separate problem has always been a matter of convenience rather than logic. And the businesses least able to carry the cost of that convenience are the ones in the middle.
So, no, invoice matching may never be the subject of a glitzy keynote. But the question of whether that lightning-fast payment should have left your business at all is arguably more important than the payment itself.
Byline bio: Dan Schonfeld is CFO at ApprovalMax, which builds the verification and approval layer that sits in front of business payments.