UK Business Payments, Evaluating the Current Landscape

The recently released “2018 UK Business Payments Barometer” provides some unique and somewhat surprising insights into how the trends surrounding UK business payments are impacting the success of organizations in the UK. For example, out of the 400 financial decision-makers in the U.K. that were surveyed:

• 56% have already adopted real-time or faster payments for regular business payments, an increase of 12% YoY
• 38% admitted to paying suppliers late in order to protect liquidity
• Concern over fraud committed by internal employees has increased 169% since 2016
• There’s been a 33% increase in cloud migrations across the majority of companies since last year

The survey also examined the big payment issues impacting the industry:

• Brexit ranked as the highest concern for 29% of respondents, overtaking security and fraud prevention. The high level of concern is likely due to ambiguity surrounding the scope of the Brexit deal and how significant the effect on business will be. What access will remain to the crucial trading bloc? How will it impact SEPA processing, etc.
• For the 44% of those organizations that have not yet adopted the Faster Payments Service (FPS), simply not needing real-time payments was the most commonly cited reason
• The impact of fraud seems to be decreasing. 44% of respondents were confident that their organization had not been a victim of fraud, which is an encouraging 11% increase from the previous year. Unfortunately, most of those impacted by fraud were unable to calculate how much had been lost and in most cases, less than 50% of the funds were able to be recovered.
• More than one in four businesses have no structured policies or practices in place to manage compliance
• Of the priorities for organizations looking to increase their use of technology, 48% plan to put it to use to improve customer and user experience, while 45% plan to invest in fraud prevention technology.

View the complete survey.