Why Bad Bank Account Data Still Breaks B2B Payments

One of the biggest hiccups impacting corporate payments today is bad bank account data.

Incorrect account numbers, outdated supplier records, mismatched account ownership information, closed accounts and onboarding errors have plagued payment operations for decades. The challenge facing finance departments is neither new nor glamorous, but what has changed is the cost of those mistakes.

As payment systems become automated and settlement windows shrink from days to seconds, inaccurate banking data is becoming an operational risk. Organizations are investing millions of dollars in payment innovation while continuing to struggle with knowing exactly where money is supposed to go.

Speed, automation and digital payment rails matter. However, none of them can overcome flawed destination data, and organizations that treat data quality as a secondary concern may find that even the most advanced payment technologies fail to deliver their promised benefits.

Read also: Good CFOs Automate but Great CFOs Anticipate

The Hidden Infrastructure Problem Behind Modern Payments

For years, payment innovation focused primarily on infrastructure. The industry competed on faster rails, improved user experiences and enhanced connectivity. Those capabilities remain important, but they are becoming table stakes. The next phase of competition may center on the quality of the information moving through those systems.

Historically, payment errors were often hidden within slower processes but that is no longer the case for today’s enterprise organizations. When payments moved through batch systems and settlement cycles stretched across multiple days, operations teams had time to identify issues, contact counterparties and intervene manually.

As organizations migrate toward instant payment rails, however, the tolerance for inaccurate information has effectively disappeared. Faster settlement simply exposes weaknesses that have always existed within underlying data management processes. Payments are expected to move immediately, often with limited opportunities for verification once a transaction is initiated, and errors that previously created delays now create outright failures.

Unlike consumer payments, where account information may remain relatively stable over long periods, B2B payment ecosystems are constantly evolving. Maintaining accurate records requires continuous verification rather than periodic updates. A sophisticated payment network cannot compensate for a supplier account number entered incorrectly during onboarding, and an automated accounts payable platform cannot resolve discrepancies if account ownership information does not match.

Suppliers change banking relationships, merge with other companies, restructure legal entities and update treasury arrangements with increasing frequency. Every change creates an opportunity for records to become outdated.

“The friction points tend to be in the operational environment,” Rene Stynen, senior vice president, EMEA, B2B Payments at Boost Payment Solutions, told PYMNTS in March. “Supplier enablement, onboarding complexity and the amount of data gathering required. Those things can become quite complex.”

“There are expectations both on buyer sides and supplier sides for things to become a little bit more digital and automated,” Stynen added.

See also: Two Years Ago vs. Today: CFOs and the ERP Shift

The Operational Costs of B2B Exception Management

Failed payments are rarely isolated incidents, and the industry’s response has been to move verification earlier in the payment lifecycle. Rather than waiting until a payment is initiated, organizations are validating supplier banking information during onboarding and continuously monitoring records over time. The goal is to identify inaccuracies before they create payment failures.

“Modernization works best when you take out the biggest bottleneck, and the biggest bottleneck is the labor today,” Finexio CEO Ernest Rolfson told PYMNTS in October. “It’s the manual entry, the fragmented workflows…”

The irony is that many organizations invest in automation specifically to reduce manual intervention. Yet inaccurate banking data forces employees back into precisely the kinds of manual workflows that automation was designed to eliminate.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: AP Transformation in 2025,” created in collaboration with Finexio, said artificial intelligence-powered targeting can achieve 90% accuracy in predicting supplier adoption of digital payment methods.

Account verification technologies, bank account validation services and identity matching solutions are gaining traction because they address the root cause of many payment failures rather than their symptoms.

The stakes are rising further because inaccurate banking information is no longer solely an operational concern. It has become a fraud concern as well. Business email compromise attacks and vendor payment fraud schemes frequently exploit weaknesses in account maintenance processes. Criminals understand that organizations routinely update supplier banking information and often attempt to insert fraudulent account details into legitimate payment workflows.

The cost of maintaining accurate payment data is often lower than the cumulative costs associated with failed transactions, supplier disputes and fraud investigations.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Ready and Willing: B2B Payments Are Headed for Real-Time Rails. Here’s How They’re Getting There,” a collaboration with The Clearing House, found that companies using real-time payment rails reported better outcomes across nearly every operational metric that matters, from liquidity management and reconciliation to supplier relationships and strategic flexibility.

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