The latest research from Corpay, a global S&P corporate payments company, reveals the pressure UK businesses feel to automate. While Corpay’s research framesBut with inefficiency framed as the greatest risk, it appears to ignore the threats created by powerful and accessible automation are overlooked. Corpay say that cCompanies are concerned about falling behind, pulled unwilling into a race to digitise and accelerate. Meanwhile, the increased risk of fraud caused by the current push to digitise and automate at pace seems to be neglected by most.
Corpay’s data reveals many UK’s businesses are worried about their automation progress., 83% of CFOs claim spend management is more manual that it should be, with a similar proportion concerned that their organisations have been slow to modernise how it pays its suppliers and manages expenses.[1] This chimes with similar studies across Europe showing that around half of SMEs across Europe still used fully manual or partially manual invoicing processes.
Piero Macari, VP Product Corporate Payments at Corpay, speaks to this shared fear of inefficiency and highlights the upsides of automation:,
“By reducing reliance on manual processes, strengthening controls and delivering full visibility across transactions, automationit helps CFOs improve working capital management while lowering risk and administrative burdens. For those looking to stay competitive, card-led payments with integrated and automated spend management is now fundamental to financial resilience and growth.”
Despite such claims for the benefits of automation, just six months ago the National Cyber Security Centre reported just six months ago that ‘highly significant’ cyber attacks have increased by 50% over the last year, providing a clear indication of both the scale and sophistication of modern cyber threats.[2] Such statistics suggest that claims about the importance of The weight and impact given to AI automation and its positive effects, do not take into account presented with total positivity, has not been countered with the increased fraud — and indeed the risk and cost of rising fraud to businesses.
Eris says: Corpay’s positive stance on automation fails to take into account the fact that, as it develops, AI is what is missed when focus remains on the benefits of efficiency in automated and integrated payment structures is that, as technologies develop, they also lowering barriers to more sophisticated fraud attacks. As companies deploy AI to streamline workflows, automating and integrating payment structures, they should bear in mind that malicious actors are using the same AI tools to scale phishing attacks, impersonate suppliers, and exploit automated approval chains.
The real opportunity for CFOs lies is in reallocatingon of time and resource, rather than the eliminatingon of manual work. Time saved through automation should not be cut from payrolls but reinvested into a final layer of human verification and anomaly detection. Automation should compress process, but it would be a mistake to leave judgement and fraud risk to AI.
Companies that strike this balance will be best positioned for success. Rather than, not treating automation as a substitute for oversight, firms should and recogniseing that any capital gains from efficiency can soon be outweighed by the increased cost of new fraud attack vectors created by the same AI companies use to automate their payments operationsfraud. Those businesses that retain intelligent control will pull ahead of the pack.
[1] Censuswide survey (Feb 2026) of 300 UK CFOs with £20m+ turnover
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