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As spending spreads, more company money may be going unreviewed — which means fraud and honest mistakes could be more likely to slip through.
The tactics behind fraud may be becoming more convincing. Deceitful requests for funds may now arrive not only by email or text, but through video and voice deepfakes that could fool even trained eyes or ears.
Combined, these forces could help generate more spending risk than many finance teams may have the tools to manage — potentially encouraging finance leaders to carefully rethink how financial oversight and security are built into their spending programs.
Fraud: A Near-Universal Cost of Doing Business
Mid-market companies could be giving more employees the ability to spend company money, and increasing how much they can spend, without always expanding the systems built to track it. The more spending authority employees have and the fewer controls there are, the easier it may be for problems to go unnoticed.
Fraud could also put additional pressure on financial security. It’s common, with businesses facing instances of payment fraud every year, and larger organizations may face fraud more often and report financial losses at higher rates.
But when fraud succeeds against a smaller firm, the consequences could be more severe. Smaller organizations may lack the recovery infrastructure of larger ones and may be more likely to absorb the full financial loss.
Building Oversight Without Adding Friction
Broader spending authority, fraud, and more convincing impersonation tactics may present real pressures, but responding to them with blanket restrictions may create its own problem: Employees who find controls too slow or too rigid may work around them.
A more workable approach could combine visibility, controls based on risk, and ongoing policy review:
- Real-time reporting on where money is moving, tied to specific cards, departments, or vendors, may give finance teams a way to identify unusual spending closer to when it occurs instead of waiting until a monthly reconciliation.
- Spending limits and approval thresholds may be set at levels that match actual risk, such as tighter thresholds for new vendors or unusual transaction types, and looser ones for routine, low-risk purchases.
- Treasury functions that might discover fraud early, whether through automated alerts or routine monitoring, could be better positioned to help recover funds or limit damage before it escalates.
- Regular policy review could be important to keeping controls aligned with how the business actually operates. Spending patterns may shift as teams grow, vendors may change, new payment methods could emerge, and policies may need to be updated accordingly.
The Bottom Line
Financial security could be rising in priority because three trends are coming together at once: More employees may be spending company money than could have been five years ago, fraud may be a more common experience rather than a rare one, and the same technology raising the sophistication of attacks might still be unused by most fraud-prevention teams. None of that may get solved by a single new policy. But it may be solved by treating oversight as something that has to keep pace with how the business actually spends.
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