According to the 2025 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, 79% of businesses experienced actual or attempted payment fraud in 2024, and business email compromise was the single most common method used. Vendor impersonation, where fraudsters pose as a legitimate supplier and request a bank account change, was cited by 60% of respondents as a primary attack vector.
The accounting department is the number one source of occupational fraud according to apexanalytix analysis of ACFE data, precisely because of the access and control they have over payment processing. apexanalytix’s bank account validation solution addresses this by removing the reliance on manual verification entirely. Rather than calling a bank or emailing a supplier to confirm a change request, the platform validates bank account ownership in real time through direct integration with global banking consortiums and verifying supplier identity with government authorities, so the accounts payable team is never the last line of defense.
Most bank account change controls only verify that an account number is formatted correctly or that a bank exists. apexanalytix goes further by confirming actual ownership, validating that the account is registered to the legal entity on the supplier’s profile through direct integration with banking and government authorities across countries including the US, Canada, UK, India, China, France, Mexico, Poland, Sweden, South Korea, Vietnam and many more.
Beyond ownership confirmation, the platform also checks that the account is in good standing, flags accounts with negative balances as high risk, and alerts the team to change requests involving accounts that were recently opened. These are some of the specific signals that fraudsters rely on going unnoticed, and apexanalytix surfaces each of them automatically before any payment is processed.
Not every country has banking infrastructure that supports direct ownership validation, which means that a purely ownership-based check leaves gaps in global coverage. apexanalytix fills those gaps with its Bank Account Confidence Score, a proprietary risk signal that draws on the platform’s database of 280 million supplier records and the payment activity of its entire client community.
The score factors in how long the bank account has been open, how frequently the account has been used across the apexanalytix network, whether other companies pay the same supplier with the same account, whether the bank country matches the supplier’s profile, and how recently the account change was accepted by other buyers. The result is a data-driven confidence rating that gives AP teams clear guidance: automate the clearly legitimate changes, and flag the suspicious ones for further review without creating friction across the entire supplier base.
This is one of the most important distinctions of the apexanalytix approach. According to Vendor Email Compromise data, attacks on supplier email accounts rose 66% in the first half of 2024 alone, meaning a fraudster may already have access to a real supplier’s email thread before the bank account change request is ever submitted. apexanalytix is designed to stop fraud even in that scenario through five independent layers of controls. Access is restricted to invited contacts only, with multi-factor authentication, blocking unsolicited requests from the outset. Bank account information is obscured after it is accepted, and current account information is required to change it, eliminating phone and email-based change requests entirely. Suspicious login behavior triggers automated IP blocking and alerts. Real-time bank account ownership validation runs against the global banking consortium regardless of how the request arrived. And multi-enterprise network intelligence cross-references the request against activity across the full apexanalytix client community. If any one of these layers is compromised, the remaining four are still in place.
According to apexanalytix analysis of ACFE data, check and payment tampering fraud schemes persist undetected for an average of 24 months before they are discovered, which means that by the time most companies realize they have a problem, the losses have been accumulating for two years.
The reason these schemes last so long is that traditional controls rely on humans catching inconsistencies in a high-volume, time-pressured process. apexanalytix eliminates the detection window by validating bank account changes automatically and in real time, before payments are released rather than after.
The Director of Finance and Procurement at one $100 billion company that adopted apexanalytix’s bank account validation put it plainly: the ability to replace manual processes with technology that validates continuously is what allows their team to deploy resources to higher-value work instead of chasing fraud after the fact.
