Moving from vulnerability to protection
In Part 1, we explored the alarming rise of AI-powered invoice fraud and why multi-site operations are uniquely vulnerable. With 79% of organisations experiencing fraud attempts and average losses exceeding $133,000 per incident, the question isn't whether to act, it's how to implement protection that actually works at scale.
Based on Gartner's recommendations, industry best practices and lessons from organisations successfully combating fraud, here are the five critical steps operations managers must take to protect their operations.
Step 1: Implement real-time unified visibility
The Problem: Fraud thrives in blind spots created by siloed systems and delayed information. When Operations and Finance work from different data sets with hours or days of lag, fraudsters exploit the gaps.
The Solution: Deploy a unified platform that gives both Operations and Finance real-time visibility into spend, commitments and invoices across all sites. Your system must flag anomalies immediately, not days or weeks later. Create dashboards highlighting spending trends, duplicate invoices and suspicious patterns the moment they occur.
This isn't just about technology, it's about creating a shared operational reality. When your procurement manager in Manchester and your finance team in Henley can both see the same supplier spend data in real time, potential fraud becomes visible. When an unusual invoice appears, both teams can immediately contextualise it against operational needs and historical patterns.
Key capabilities to prioritise:
- Cross-site spend visibility aggregated by vendor, category and time period
- Real-time alerts for anomalies such as invoices exceeding historical averages by specific thresholds
- Dashboard views that show both financial metrics and operational context
- Automated flagging of duplicate invoices across all locations
- Spend pattern analysis that identifies unusual purchasing behaviours
Implementation insight: Start with visibility before adding controls. Many organisations fail by implementing strict controls without first understanding their baseline. Spend 30-60 days mapping your current spending patterns across all sites, then use this data to establish intelligent thresholds for alerts.
How OmniPATH helps:
OmniPATH consolidates financial and operational data across invoices, suppliers, purchases and performance metrics into a single intelligent platform. AI-driven anomaly detection and real-time alerts identify potential fraud as it happens, not after the damage is done.
The platform's unified visibility means Operations and Finance finally see the same version of truth, eliminating the data gaps fraudsters exploit. When a hotel manager in Leeds approves a £3,000 linen order, your finance team instantly sees it contextualised against occupancy rates, historical spend and budget allocations - making fraudulent invoices immediately obvious.
Step 2: Automate supplier onboarding and verification
The Problem: Ghost supplier and fraudulent supplier accounts slip through manual verification, especially across multiple sites where no central team validates every supplier. The average ghost supplier scheme costs $40,000 before detection and many run for 18+ months.
The Solution: Require real-time company number matching and HMRC verification for every new supplier without exception. Implement automated suplier database checks against known fraud lists. Use Confirmation of Payee (CoP) verification to validate vendor bank details before first payment. Set up regular automated re-verification for existing suppliers.
Best practices for vendor verification:
- Automated company number matching and HMRC verification before vendor activation
- Bank account verification through Confirmation of Payee (CoP) verification services
- Cross-reference against fraud databases and sanction lists
- Regular re-verification (annually minimum) for allactive suppliers
- Address verification to catch PO boxes or employee addresses
- Website and digital footprint validation for new suppliers
The data advantage: Organisations using automated vendor verification reduce ghost supplier fraud by up to 90%. The key is making verification automatic and non-negotiable - no exceptions for "urgent" requests or "trusted" referrals.
How OmniPATH helps:
OmniPATH's intelligent procurement workflows enforce consistent supplier onboarding standards across all locations. The system automatically validates supplier information, maintains comprehensive audit trails and flags vendors who don't meet verification requirements, preventing ghost suppliers from ever entering your payment ecosystem.
Firstly there is limited access for suppliers to be added manually. New suppliers can email their invoice to OmniPATH which will immediately classify them as 'unverified' which means that no spend can be assigned to them without consent. This gives time for the appropriate lead to 'verify', which means an automated Companies House verification and VAT number validation. The system requires complete documentation before the vendor can be approved to receive payments. No local override, no exceptions - ensuring that a ghost supplier created at one location can't slip through and receive payments across your operation.
Step 3: Deploy AI-enhanced controls and approval workflows
The Problem: Manual approval processes can't keep pace with sophisticated fraud attempts. When fraudsters use social engineering to by-pass controls, traditional workflows fail. A single compromised email account can authorise fraudulent payments across multiple sites before anyone notices.
The Solution: Create role-based approval workflows with strict segregation of duties. Implement AI-driven anomaly detection that learns normal patterns and flags deviations. Use multi-factor authentication for all payment approvals. Set automated alerts for high-risk transactions: large amounts, new vendors and changed bank details. Require separate approvals for vendor creation and payment execution.
Critical workflow principles:
- Segregation of duties: The person who creates a supplier cannot approve payments to that supplier
- Tiered approvals: Different authorisation levels based on amount, vendor status and risk factors
- Multi-factor authentication: Required for all payment approvals above defined thresholds
- Anomaly-based escalation: AI identifies unusual patterns and routes to senior approval
- Immutable audit trails: Every action logged with timestamp, user and justification
Gartner's recommendation: Point solutions from multiple business functions will be consolidated into unified platforms centred around case management and decisioning engines. Organisations must move toward AI-enabled fraud prevention making real-time decisions across the entire payment lifecycle.
How OmniPATH helps:
OmniPATH introduces approval flows with customisable tiers for onboarding, bill entry and payment release. The platform's AI analyses historical trends, purchase frequencies and supplier performance to identify optimisation opportunities while simultaneously detecting suspicious patterns.
Immutable audit trails ensure every change is logged, making internal collusion and fraudster impersonation dramatically harder. When every supplier creation, invoice submission, and payment approval is permanently recorded with full context, fraud becomes exponentially more difficult to hide.
Step 4: Eliminate manual processes through end-to-end automation
The Problem: Manual invoice processing is slow, expensive and statistically vulnerable to error and fraud at scale. Human reviewers simply cannot catch sophisticated fraud when processing thousands of invoices monthly. Finance teams spending 80% of their time on manual tasks have no capacity for strategic fraud prevention.
The Solution: Deploy technology to automatically capture and validate invoice details. Automate three-way matching (PO, Receipt, Invoice) to catch discrepancies immediately. Implement automated duplicate detection across all sites and time periods. Use AI to flag invoices deviating from normal supplier patterns.
Automation priorities:
- Invoice capture: eliminate manual data entry and associated errors
- Three-way matching: Automated Order-Receipt-Invoice reconciliation catches discrepancies instantly
- Duplicate detection: Cross-site, cross-period scanning identifies duplicates fraudsters count on slipping through
- Supplier pattern analysis: AI learns normal supplier behaviors and flags deviations
- Exception-based workflows: Route only unusual invoices to human review, automate the routine
The data:
- Processing time reduced from 7-14 days to 1-3 days
- Up to 80% reduction in processing costs
- AI-powered invoice processing reduces payment cycle times by up to 75%
- Automated fraud detection reduces payment errors by 60-70% and prevents duplicate payments worth 1-3% of spend
Implementation reality: The goal isn't to eliminate human judgement, it's to focus human attention where it matters most. Automate the 80% of routine, legitimate invoices so your team can focus deeply on the 20% that show anomalies.
How OmniPATH helps:
OmniPATH connects every transaction from initial request to final payment, providing end-to-end visibility that prevents duplicate spending and ensures supplier compliance.The platform's automated controls eliminate manual data entry errors while intelligent matching capabilities instantly identify discrepancies that might indicate fraud.
Rather than finance teams spending 80% of their time chasing paperwork, OmniPATH automates routine processing and routes exceptions to the right people with the right context. When an invoice arrives that deviates from expected patterns, the system doesn't just flag it - it provides full context: historical spend with this vendor, operational activity at the requesting site, budget status and similar transactions for comparison.
The result: your finance teambecomes a fraud prevention team, not a data entry team.
Step 5: Foster Cyber-Fraud Fusion - break down organisational silos
The Problem: Fraud prevention fails when IT, Finance and Operations work in isolation with different tools, priorities and data. Fraudsters exploit these organis ational disconnects. A BEC attack might be visible to IT as a suspicious email pattern, to Finance as an unusual payment request and to Operations as an odd vendor communication, but if these teams don't share intelligence in real time, the fraud succeeds.
The Solution: Create cross-functional fraud response teams including IT security, Finance and Operations. Implement shared threat intelligence across departments. Conduct regular fraud awareness training for all staff, not just Finance. Establish clear escalation protocols when fraud is suspected. Share fraud attempts and near-misses across all locations to build organisational learning.
Building effective Cyber-Fraud Fusion:
- Shared platforms: IT, Finance and Operations need visibility into the same data
- Regular cross-functional meetings: Weekly or monthly fraud review sessions
- Unified incident response: Clear protocols for who does what when fraud is detected
- Organisation-wide training: Everyone from site managers to finance directors understands fraud tactics
- Threat intelligence sharing: Fraud attempts at one location immediately communicated to all locations
Gartner's 2026 Prediction: 96% of organisations will have cybersecurity vulnerability assessments in their audit plans. By 2026, 50% of large financial institutions and online retailers will consolidate online fraud prevention into cyber operations. The convergence of fraud prevention, identity management and cybersecurity into unified operations is essential for survival.
Cultural shift required: This isn't just a technology change, it's an organisational transformation. Finance can no longer own fraud prevention alone. IT can't treat it as purely a security issue. Operations can't view it as someone else's problem. Fraud prevention becomes everyone's responsibility with shared tools, shared data and shared accountability.
How OmniPATH helps:
By providing a single source of truth where Operations, Finance and IT see the same data in real time, OmniPATH naturally breaks down the silos fraudsters exploit. Comprehensive dashboards and customisable alerts ensure the right people get the right information at the right time, whether that's a CFO reviewing unusual spending, an operations manager approving a purchase or IT identifying a security threat.
When IT notices suspicious login activity from an unusual location, Finance sees which vendors were accessed and Operations understands which sites might be affected, all in the same platform in real time. This unified approach embodies the Cyber-Fraud Fusion model Gartner predicts will dominate the next decade.
The platform's LEDGE AI agent continuously learns from patterns across all three domains, operational activity, financial transactions and security events, providing holistic fraud detection that siloed systems simply cannot match.
Conclusion
Managing invoice fraud at scale requires more than good intentions and manual vigilance, it demands systematic, automated, intelligent protection that scales with your operational complexity.
The five steps outlined here represent the minimum viable fraud prevention program for multi-site operations: unified visibility so fraud has nowhere to hide, automated verification so ghost suppliers can't establish themselves, intelligent controls so social engineering can't bypass your defenses, end-to-end automation so human error doesn't create vulnerabilities and organisational fusion so fraudsters can't exploit siloed thinking.
Purpose-built solutions like OmniPATH exist precisely because generic accounting software and point solutions can't deliver these capabilities for multi-site operations. When you're managing dozens or hundreds of locations, thousands of invoices monthly and complex procurement across hospitality, care or leisure sectors you need systems designed specifically for this operational reality.
The investment in proper fraud prevention isn't a cost, it's preservation of the revenue you've already earned. When 78% of fraud victims can't recover their losses and the average incident costs $133,000, prevention is exponentially more valuable than recovery.
Operations managers who implement these five steps don't just reduce fraud, they transform their finance teams from reactive paper-chasers into proactive protectors of operational integrity. They turn their biggest vulnerability (operational complexity) into their greatest strength (comprehensive visibility). And they sleep better knowing their margins are protected.
Ready to implement fraud protection that actually works at scale?
Discover how OmniPATH provides the unified visibility, automated controls and AI-driven intelligence your multi-site operation needs to eliminate fraud vulnerabilities.
In Part 3, we'll explore the future of fraud prevention - what's coming in 2026 and beyond and why purpose-built unified solutions will separate survivors from victims.
