B2B payments have always been the backbone of commerce, but they are no longer just domestic wire transfers or check runs. Today, global supply chains, digital platforms, and distributed workforces mean that businesses are paying across borders more than ever. The B2B cross-border payments market already totals USD 31.7 trillion in 2024 and is expected to exceed USD 47.8 trillion by 2032 (FXC Intelligence).
This growth brings opportunities but also complexity. Bulk payouts spanning multiple jurisdictions, currencies, and banking systems create fertile ground for both fraud and error. What used to be a simple accounts payable task has become one of the riskiest parts of financial operations. For finance teams striving for accounts payable efficiency, every failed transaction or incorrect detail adds cost and delay.
What Are B2B Payments?
B2B payments are any money transfers that originate from a business. These can be domestic or international, one-off or recurring. They include paying supplier invoices, settling with professional service providers, funding contractor work, and covering trade obligations.
For this discussion, we also include business-to-consumer payouts where the payer is an enterprise, such as insurance companies settling claims, platforms paying freelancers, or marketplaces disbursing earnings to sellers. What we exclude are consumer-to-consumer remittances and wholesale interbank transfers.
The situation becomes more complex as many payments are executed through files. Think of a multinational paying hundreds of overseas suppliers at month-end, or a gig platform transferring earnings to thousands of freelancers each week. Unlike a single transaction, payouts involve files with hundreds or even thousands of entries. That scale introduces efficiency pressures and creates blind spots where fraud and failure can hide, especially in bulk payout processing environments.
The Problems with B2B Payouts
Gig worker payroll: A global freelancing platform runs its weekly payout cycle. Hundreds of payments bounce back because workers’ account details were outdated. At the same time, a fraudster sneaks in multiple fake accounts and successfully gets duplicate payments before being flagged. The outcome: days of reprocessing, mounting FX charges, and frustrated freelancers whose earnings are delayed.
Corporate vendor payouts: A multinational manufacturer pays hundreds of suppliers across Asia and Europe. One payment fails because a vendor’s bank account was never updated. Another invoice is intercepted and altered by a fraudster, diverting funds to an account abroad. The first error leads to operational delays, the second to a six-figure loss and lasting damage to supplier trust.
These scenarios reflect broader patterns of risk:
- Vendor payment fraud is rising sharply, driven by more complex supply chains and digital payouts.
- Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams drained USD 6.7 billion globally in 2023 (Verafin).
- Invoice fraud in the U.S. averages USD 133,000 per incident (CFO.com).
- Nearly one-third of businesses were targeted with fake invoices in the past year (SMH Group).
Even without fraud, errors are costly. Outdated or mismatched account details, such as IBANs, SWIFT codes, or local routing numbers, cause payments to fail or be delayed. Manual verification processes only add to the strain. Chasing suppliers for updated details is time-consuming, error-prone, and nearly impossible to scale across time zones. Every failure carries real costs, including FX losses, reprocessing fees, reconciliation work, and tense conversations with vendors.
According to PYMNTS, up to 11% of cross-border payments fail or incur extra charges due to incorrect or outdated information, adding to the global total of failed payment costs. In a bulk payout file, even one wrong digit in an IBAN can stall a payment for days, creating frustration on both sides and damaging supplier relationships.
How Payee Verification Solves the Problem
The good news is that these risks can be managed. Payee verification provides a safeguard by confirming that bank account details truly belong to the intended recipient, helping organizations prevent payment fraud and reduce payment failures.
What makes it powerful is flexibility. Businesses can apply verification at vendor onboarding, during payout execution, or through regular refreshes of their payee databases.
In each case, the goal is the same: stop fraud and error before money leaves the account.
This is where iPiD comes in. iPiD offers the world’s largest Know Your Payee (KYP) network, enabling validation of over 80% of the global banked population across 30 countries and counting. With a single API, clients can instantly verify payees, reduce payment failures, and maintain the accuracy of their payables directories at scale. Whether you are handling global supplier payments, paying freelancers, or issuing insurance payouts, iPiD ensures that every transfer reaches the right person, in the right account.
For example, Mazepay, a B2B process platform for large corporates, integrates iPiD’s payee verification into its supplier onboarding flow. This removes manual email-based verification, accelerates supplier approval from hours or days to minutes, and increases payment security by independently confirming account ownership before payout. By partnering with iPiD, Mazepay ensures global coverage from the start in improving procurement efficiency while reducing supplier friction and risk.
Similarly, iBanFirst, a cross-border payment platform serving SMEs, leverages iPiD’s verification network to improve accuracy in supplier settlements and reduce costly reprocessing from failed payments. Both companies show how businesses of all sizes can use payee verification to build trust and improve accounts payable efficiency in global supplier payments.
Future-Proof Your B2B Payouts
As cross-border B2B payout solutions scale into the tens of trillions, finance teams can no longer treat fraud and failed payments as “just part of the job.” Payee verification is both a shield and an efficiency driver, ensuring that every bulk payout reaches the right person or business, in the right account, the first time.
See how payee verification can improve your B2B payout outcomes and drive greater accounts payable efficiency.
References
- FXC Intelligence - How big is the B2B cross-border payments market? (2025).
- Verafin - Business Email Compromise: A Global Menace (2024).
- CFO.com - Invoice fraud costs average company more than $1M per year; report highlights risks of deepfakes (2024).
- SMH Group - Invoice Fraud on the Rise: One-Third of Businesses Targeted (2023).
- PYMNTS - Cross-Border Sales and the Challenge of Failed Payments: Failed cross-border payments cost U.S. merchants an estimated $3.8B (2024).
