78% of CFOs Say Payment Blind Spots Increase Customer Friction

More than half said fraud or payment-risk controls had caused delays that negatively affected customers or business partners during the previous year.

As payments accelerate and businesses connect more customers, vendors and financial accounts, fraud controls increasingly shape the performance of legitimate commerce. A system can successfully block suspicious activity and still fail the business if it delays good payments, produces too many false positives or forces customers through confusing verification processes.

Effective fraud prevention today must accomplish three things simultaneously. It must protect the transaction, preserve the movement of legitimate money and give everyone involved enough visibility to trust the process.

Fraud Prevention Must Protect Revenue, Not Just Transactions

The first priority is to stop treating payment friction as an unavoidable cost of security.

Businesses have long accepted that stronger verification will occasionally slow a payment. But the cumulative cost of those delays can be much larger than the individual incidents suggest. They can hold up orders, interrupt supplier relationships, increase customer-service volume and create uncertainty about whether a transaction has succeeded.

The study found that companies experiencing recurring payment friction estimated that delays, errors, fraud and the work required to resolve them consumed 192 basis points of annual revenue, or nearly 2%. That was more than six times the 31-basis-point cost reported by companies experiencing little friction.

This does not mean businesses should relax their controls. It means they need to distinguish more precisely between suspicious activity and ordinary transactions. Broad rules that send large numbers of payments into manual review may appear cautious, but they can simply shift the financial loss from fraud to operational friction.

The second priority is infrastructure. Payment friction is often described as a trade-off between speed and safety. In practice, however, the largest divide may be between companies with integrated controls and those relying on fragmented tools, manual reviews and disconnected approval processes.

Read the report: When Controls Slow Commerce: The Data Behind Middle-Market Payment Friction

Companies that rarely experienced payment delays gave their payment-handling capabilities an average score of 71 out of 100. Companies with recurring delays scored themselves at 42. That 30-point difference was three times wider than the capability gap between businesses operating in relatively stable and highly uncertain environments.

When verification tools sit outside the payment workflow, every exception becomes a judgment call. Employees must collect additional information, move between systems or wait for another department to approve the transaction. The control may eventually reach the correct decision, but it does so too slowly and at too high a cost.

The objective is not automation for its own sake. It is to move fraud detection closer to the moment of payment.

The third priority, then, is to recognize fraud prevention as part of the customer experience.

A delayed payment rarely remains a purely operational event. When customers or suppliers cannot see where their money is, why a transaction has been stopped or how long the review will take, a processing problem becomes a communication problem. That communication problem can then become a trust problem.

Seventy-eight percent of CFOs said visibility and communication gaps involving fees, timelines or payment policies had increased customer friction. The same share cited execution failures such as delayed or incorrect payments. Companies with recurring friction were also more likely than friction-light firms to report inconsistent experiences across payment channels and burdensome authentication.

Stopping fraud remains essential. But the more demanding standard is stopping fraud without stopping commerce.