Compliance Gaps Expose B2B Payments to Escalating Cyber Threats

Watch more: Legacy Compliance Gaps Expose B2B Payments to Escalating Cyber Threats

Fraud in the B2B payments space has gone from the occasional operational hiccup to a persistent, adaptive adversary.

The reason? With transaction volumes and values dwarfing those in the consumer space, B2B payments have become an obvious target for fraudsters whose tactics have evolved in sophistication as quickly as digital commerce itself.

“B2B is especially vulnerable or especially high stakes because of the higher transaction amounts and volumes,” Boost Payment Solutions Chief Compliance Officer Elly Aiala said during a discussion hosted by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “In the B2C world, there can be compromises of the lower amount, but in the B2B world, a lot more is at stake.”

That concentration of value makes the stakes existential. A single breach can mean millions of dollars in unrecoverable losses, reputational damage and long-term erosion of partner trust.

“It’s sort of like, why do people rob banks? Because that’s where the money is,” Webster said. “Why is there such B2B fraud? That’s where a lot of the money is.”

The problem isn’t just the money at stake, but the systems fraudsters can exploit, like complex payment chains, legacy infrastructure and slow-moving institutional processes. Without constant review and retraining, even well-intentioned safeguards become blind spots for exploitation.

Institutions “can be a little bit slower to change,” Aiala said, adding that inertia can ultimately be a fraudster’s greatest ally.

The High Stakes of B2B Fraud

The B2B payments risk profile is compounded by its endemic operational complexity. Multistep approval chains, regulatory oversight and entrenched systems mean fraudulent activity can slip through unnoticed until after money is gone.

The first line of defense is building compliance into the architecture of products and services, not bolting it on later, Aiala said.

“It really comes down to how your infrastructure is built,” she said. “The best companies are continuously reevaluating their risks.”

In cybersecurity terms, a “threat vector” is any path an attacker might use to infiltrate a system, she said. For B2B payments, that path could be a compromised vendor onboarding process, a weak authentication method or a single employee tricked by a well-crafted phishing email.

When Webster asked what “reducing the threat vector” means in practice, Aiala described a tailored, data-driven approach.

“The first step is really looking at how you are operationally performing your products and services, your internal controls,” she said. “Does that match up with your policy and procedures? Does that match up with what you’re seeing in patterns in transactions?”

For example, if a certain merchant category code (MCC) is onboarding at an unusual rate, compliance needs to ensure controls are in place to manage the associated risks and guarantee that day-to-day operations adhere to those controls.

The approach is tailored, not templated.

“A one-size-fits-all framework can miss the actual risks in a relationship,” Aiala said.

Turning Compliance Into a Business Enabler

Payments innovation is accelerating toward instant settlement. Real-time rails are becoming standard domestically, while stablecoins and other blockchain-based methods promise to move money across borders in seconds.

For compliance leaders, this speed poses a paradox. The decision to adopt faster payment methods should weigh customer demand for immediacy against the recoverability of funds in case of fraud.

Boost has researched stablecoin settlement for years, but Aiala said caution is key.

“We need to continually evaluate options and understand traceability, financial crime exposure, compliance and recoverability,” she said.

“Speed plus the irreversible nature of crypto transactions can be daunting,” she added. While blockchain payments are traceable, “traceable doesn’t always mean recoverable.”

Technology alone can’t seal every gap. The weakest link is often a human being making a split-second decision. In an era where artificial intelligence can generate convincing executive impersonations, the potential for social engineering at scale is higher than ever. The same data-rich systems that detect fraud must also be safeguarded against misuse.

Against this backdrop, a troubling trend is compliance programs that look sophisticated on paper but fail in practice, Aiala said.

“You don’t want your program to be pure optics or ‘check the box,’” she said. “I’ve seen programs so overly robust they’re not catered to the actual risk of the relationship.”

The prescription is more frequent, targeted check-ins and genuine education over sprawling, once-a-year audits, she said

“It ends up being a business enabler, and it helps our partners understand why Boost’s threat landscape is so small,” she said.

The Playbook for Reducing B2B Payment Fraud

Boost’s proprietary platforms, such as Boost Intercept and Boost 100, were designed with transaction integrity as a core principle, not an afterthought.

“It’s one of the reasons we’ve had zero fraud losses to date,” Aiala said.

In a sector where transactions are measured in millions and reputations are built on trust, the stakes are high. The compliance war room is no longer a back-office function; it’s a command center for corporate resilience.

“A transaction should happen at the right place, at the right time, with the right parties,” she said. “That’s how commerce happens.”

Aiala said her framework for shrinking the attack surface blends technology, process discipline and culture. She recommended building security in from day one to avoid retrofitting controls; continuously reviewing processes by moving from annual audits to more frequent risk reviews; empowering employees to speak up by making fraud reporting culturally safe; tailoring controls to the risks by avoiding one-size-fits-all frameworks; and balancing speed with recoverability by evaluating trade-offs in payments innovations.

In the era of AI-driven fraud, instant payments and complex global supply chains, embracing a compliance-first framework may be the most valuable asset a B2B payments company can have.

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