AccessPay, the leading bank integration provider, today announced the release of its new report: Finance Trends 2025. This marks the third year that AccessPay has published the report, which is based on an online survey of finance professionals. It explores finance and treasury teams’ digital transformation status, ISO 20022 preparations, and approach to fraud management. It also presents a deep dive into the financial services, legal and retail sectors.

Anish Kapoor, CEO of AccessPay, explains, “In contrast to our personal lives, where highly automated digital banking and payments are now the norm, banking processes for businesses and institutions are full of manual processes. In our annual survey of finance and treasury professionals, we wanted to understand the state of finance transformation in corporates and financial institutions and determine how and where they are focusing their digitisation efforts as we start 2025.”

Key findings from the report include the following: 

Account name verification tops firms’ technology priorities

For most companies, finance transformation is a work in progress. Just 13% had fully digitised, while 69% stated they were in the midst of digital transformation with a combination of manual and digital processes. Financial services firms were the most advanced with their finance transformation efforts, and legal firms the least.

The top three technology priorities for finance teams are implementing CoP1 or ANV2 technology (50%), payment automation (47%) and cloud technology adoption (39%). Despite the headlines, GenAI3 was cited as a high priority by just 15% of respondents, though 46% considered it a medium priority.

Minimal action taken for new ISO 20022 mandatory data requirements

Corporate preparations for the new ISO 20022 mandatory data requirements for CHAPS transactions4 have been limited. 26% of respondents were unaware of ISO 20022, while 50% said they were aware of the format but had not made any preparations.

The new data requirements start to come into play in May 2025, when the Bank of England will require financial institutions to include PoP5 codes and LEIs6 in all transactions. They will eventually affect all corporates, who will need to plug data gaps and update finance systems.

Invoice scams rank as top fraud concern

The top three fraud concerns of companies were invoice fraud (60%), fraudulent online payments (53%) and impersonation fraud (47%). To combat fraud, firms were most likely to rely on staff training on spotting fraud (72%), followed by CoP/ANV technology (58%). However, there was a significant divergence between sectors in the approach to fraud prevention, with financial services firms most likely to adopt a multi-layered approach.

“Finance and treasury teams play a vital role in helping companies perform at their optimum, but there is still a lot of progress to be made in terms of digital transformation,” comments Kapoor. “Many are focused on day-to-day operations and regulatory compliance but struggle to understand the extent to which technological advances can transform the finance function. This is where AccessPay comes in with its consultancy services to advise on finance transformation and its bank-integration technology platform to assist with payment automation, ISO 20022 readiness, and fraud prevention.”