Businesses now pay by many methods, but the old systems can't keep up

Paying a vendor used to mean a check or a bank transfer. Now a single business may use several methods at once, and the older systems behind them were not built for that. A new industry piece argues the gap is raising costs and opening doors for fraud.

What changed

In 2024, ACH, the standard electronic bank-to-bank transfer, overtook checks as the most common way U.S. businesses pay each other. From 2015 to 2024, ACH's share rose from 25% to 41%. Checks fell from 32% to 13%. Newer options now sit alongside them, including real-time payments, virtual cards (one-time digital card numbers) and cross-border payments.

Each method has its own fraud checks, settlement timing and compliance rules. One insurance claim, for example, can pay a provider by ACH, a member by prepaid card and a contractor by check.

Why old systems struggle

When older systems cannot handle a payment type, companies add workarounds: another vendor, a manual step, a parallel system. The article says that pushes the true cost of a paper check to about $4, compared with $0.26 to $0.50 for an ACH payment.

The result is scattered tools. More than 90% of organizations use two or more payment vendors. 30% use four or more. 55% say their systems do not talk to each other.

Where fraud gets in

In 2025, 76% of organizations were hit by payments fraud. The article says each new payment type can open a new weak spot. Attackers target the handoff between the people who approve a payment and the system that sends the money. Examples include fake emails from someone posing as a vendor and requests to change a vendor's bank account.

Pressure from rules and government

• NACHA rules effective March 20, 2026 require real-time fraud detection on all outgoing ACH payments.
• In March 2025, the White House ordered federal agencies to stop issuing paper checks.
• Treasury said checks are 16 times more likely to be lost, stolen or altered than digital payments.

Treasury also said paper payment infrastructure cost the federal government $657 million in fiscal year 2024.

What to do

Count how many tools your business uses to pay people, and check whether they share information. Look for signs of the handoff problem, such as invoices stuck in approval or the same vendor listed more than once under one tax ID number. The article's own examples include an invoice stuck for 45 days and three vendor records tied to one tax ID.

One caution: the piece ends by promoting ECHO's platform, which it says handles every payment type in one system. The claims are the company's own, and the article offers no independent proof that one platform fixes the problem.