Supplier fraud has become one of the most persistent threats to UK corporate finances, causing significant losses and damaging critical business partnerships. Criminals stole £1.28 billion through payment fraud in the UK in 2025, and business losses from authorised push payment scams reached £75.6 million (UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026). That makes optimising your supplier management a priority for any organisation that wants a secure, resilient supply chain.
The pressure is no longer commercial alone. Since 1 September 2025, the failure to prevent fraud offence under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 has made large UK organisations criminally liable where an associated person commits fraud for their benefit and reasonable prevention procedures were not in place. Supplier controls sit squarely inside that scope.
Read on to learn the five supplier management best practices to implement now, and how Trustpair’s supplier fraud prevention platform secures your supplier relationships through continuous, automated data validation.
Key Takeaways
- Centralisation is critical: moving from spreadsheets to a single supplier master record reduces errors and strengthens supply chain agility.
- Fraud exposure is high: 94% of UK companies experienced payment fraud in 2024, yet only 10% verify bank account details across the full procure-to-pay cycle (Trustpair UK Fraud Study 2025).
- Compliance is now mandatory: the ECCTA failure to prevent fraud offence means supplier due diligence is a legal control, not a nice-to-have.
- Data drives decisions: only 21% of procurement leaders report strong supplier data analysis capabilities, leaving most organisations blind to performance and risk.
- Confirmation of Payee is not enough: it covers domestic UK accounts only, so international suppliers need automated account ownership verification.
What Are the 5 Supplier Management Best Practices?
The five best practices are centralising supplier data, using performance analytics, streamlining the procure-to-pay process, running continuous risk assessments, and automating bank account validation. Together they cover the full supplier lifecycle, from onboarding through to payment.
| # | Best practice | Primary benefit | Risk addressed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Centralise supplier data | Eliminates fragmented records and communication gaps | Human error, unauthorised data changes |
| 2 | Apply performance analytics | Turns raw supplier data into actionable KPIs | Cost overruns, delivery failures |
| 3 | Streamline procure-to-pay | Removes bottlenecks, adds security checkpoints | Invoice and mandate fraud |
| 4 | Assess supplier risk continuously | Readiness for supplier failure or disruption | Supply chain disruption, compliance breaches |
| 5 | Automate account validation | Blocks fraudulent payments before they leave | Payment diversion fraud |
Why Should You Centralise Your Supplier Data Management?
Centralising supplier data ensures that every critical detail, from bank account information to contract terms, sits in a single secure source of truth. Moving away from fragmented Excel spreadsheets and email chains creates a supplier database that is far less exposed to the human errors fraudsters exploit.
In practice, that means using one system to hold:
- Contract terms and renewal dates
- Purchase orders
- Invoices
- Bank account details, including sort code and account number
- Companies House registration data and VAT numbers
- All remaining contact and compliance information
Centralised master data saves time on your side and on your suppliers’ side. No more chasing invoices or double-checking which version is current. It is more productive for everyone, and it produces fewer errors and misunderstandings.
Supplier relationship management platforms are now widely available in the UK market. They streamline procurement workflows and encourage collaboration between your suppliers and your teams, often through dual access so both parties see status in real time.
The problem with spreadsheets is structural rather than occasional. They are error-prone, information routinely goes missing, and they are rarely current. Poor data quality costs organisations an average of £10.2 million per year according to Gartner, and the average supplier master file contains roughly 10% errors at any given moment. If you are auditing your records for the first time, our guide to why vendor data management is critical for your business is a useful starting point.
Whichever system you choose, implementing a supplier management system will help you govern your data and communicate clearly. That in turn increases supply chain agility. Checking supplier contracts or onboarding a new supplier stops being a tedious, time-consuming task, which means faster responses to unexpected events and greater supplier resilience.
How Can You Use Analytics to Improve Supplier Performance?
Analytics transform raw supplier data into KPIs that drive better decisions and measurable cost savings. The only way to optimise supplier management performance is to know precisely where you stand today, which usually means starting or revisiting the KPIs you track against your suppliers.
Criteria worth monitoring:
- Delivery time and on-time-in-full rates
- Total cost, including the hidden cost of poor quality
- Quality control and defect rates
- ESG standards, increasingly relevant under UK supply chain due diligence expectations
- Payment terms compliance under the Reporting on Payment Practices and Performance Regulations
These KPIs let you monitor both overall and individual supplier performance, and analytics is a standard feature of most supplier management software.
However, research from Harvard Business Review found that only 21% of procurement leaders report having strong supplier data analysis capabilities. That gap matters, because it means most organisations are making sourcing decisions on incomplete information.
Knowing where you stand with your suppliers at all times gives you far more control over your supply chain, which translates into lower costs, improved quality and faster delivery. It also supports better decision-making based on current data rather than last quarter’s assumptions.
At a glance, you can compare suppliers and decide where to invest strategically for future growth. Data-driven supplier relationships are the foundation of a resilient business.
[Suggested chart: horizontal bar chart showing 21% of procurement leaders with strong supplier data capabilities versus 79% without — source: Harvard Business Review]
How Do You Streamline Your Procure-to-Pay Process?
You streamline the process by reviewing every touchpoint in the supplier lifecycle to remove bottlenecks and reinforce security checkpoints. Effective procure-to-pay cycles depend on seamless collaboration between finance, legal and procurement teams.
The optimised supplier lifecycle involves four stages:
- Supplier qualification: to determine whether a potential supplier can genuinely provide goods and services that meet your operational requirements.
- Supplier classification: to allocate suppliers to categories based on pre-established criteria, leading to a formal selection and a signed supplier contract.
- Supplier collaboration: to align strategic goals, strengthen the relationship and support mutually beneficial growth.
- Supplier evaluation: to confirm suppliers meet contractual requirements and continue to perform.
Finance, legal and procurement teams spend a substantial share of their week on supplier management. It is good practice to ask those teams periodically about the efficiency and safety of the processes they use daily.
Accounts payable may tell you that three-way matching of purchase order, invoice and payment is difficult in the current workflow. Treasury may want clearer visibility over which invoices have already been settled in order to forecast cash flow accurately. Both are signals worth acting on, and our breakdown of the procure-to-pay process and its challenges covers the most common friction points.
Security must be built into each stage rather than bolted on at the end. Procurement fraud is a constant risk, and fraudsters have become significantly more capable with AI-assisted tooling. Fake invoice fraud affected 11% of UK businesses with employees in the year to 2024, and mandate fraud a further 7%, according to the Home Office Economic Crime Survey.
Why Must You Continually Evaluate Your Supplier Risks?
Continuous supplier risk assessment is essential because a supplier that was low risk at onboarding may not be low risk twelve months later. It means assessing your suppliers’ strengths and weaknesses, and thinking through best and worst-case scenarios so you are prepared for both.
Questions worth answering:
- Do you have a contingency plan if your primary supplier enters administration?
- What happens if input costs rise beyond the point where you remain profitable?
- Do you know who holds significant control over your suppliers, as recorded on the Companies House PSC register?
- Are any of your suppliers, or their beneficial owners, on the OFSI consolidated sanctions list?
All of these questions need answers, and those answers need monitoring over time. Checking them once during supplier onboarding is not sufficient. Ongoing verification must be embedded in supplier lifecycle management to prevent disruption and maintain compliance. Our guide to Know Your Supplier compliance sets out how to structure a formal supplier screening programme.
Continuous risk evaluation means you stay prepared for any eventuality while remaining compliant with UK law and regulation, including the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, the Data Protection Act 2018 and the internal control requirements of the Companies Act 2006.
What Do UK Regulations Require from Supplier Management?
UK organisations now face direct legal obligations around supplier and payment controls, principally through ECCTA 2023, Confirmation of Payee and the PSR reimbursement rules.
| Regulation | In force | What it means for supplier management |
|---|---|---|
| ECCTA 2023 — failure to prevent fraud | 1 September 2025 | Large organisations (250+ employees, £36m+ turnover or £18m+ assets) must show reasonable prevention procedures; supplier due diligence is a core control |
| Confirmation of Payee | Expanded October 2024 | Name-checks domestic UK payments only; no cover for international suppliers or compromised supplier emails |
| PSR APP reimbursement rules | October 2024 | Reimbursement up to £85,000; 89% of in-scope APP fraud reimbursed in the first 15 months, raising scrutiny of corporate payment controls |
| UK GDPR / Data Protection Act 2018 | Ongoing | Article 5(1)(d) requires supplier records to be accurate and kept up to date |
The practical implication is that supplier data accuracy has moved from an operational preference to an auditable compliance obligation.
How Does Automated Account Validation Secure Supplier Payments?
Automated account validation secures your payments by verifying in real time that the bank account you are about to pay genuinely belongs to your supplier, before the transfer is authorised. As AI-driven supplier fraud schemes grow more convincing, manual callbacks and email confirmations are routinely bypassed by social engineering.
This is where Confirmation of Payee reaches its limit. It validates domestic UK accounts, but most enterprise supply chains are international. Trustpair validates supplier accounts across 190 countries, covering UK sort codes and account numbers alongside IBAN and SWIFT.
Trustpair’s platform provides:
- Automated validation: comparing supplier data against the largest network of banking data sources on the market.
- Fraud detection: alerting your team the moment bank details are altered anywhere in the supplier lifecycle.
- Continuous monitoring: so a supplier verified at onboarding stays verified at payment.
- Efficiency gains: freeing finance teams from manual validations that average over 30 minutes each.
| Capability | Confirmation of Payee | Trustpair automated validation |
|---|---|---|
| Domestic UK accounts | Yes | Yes |
| International suppliers | No | Yes, 190 countries |
| Continuous monitoring | No | Yes, real-time alerts |
| ERP and P2P integration | No | Yes, native connectors |
With Trustpair, you always know who you are paying. Payments go out safely and confidently, without hours of manual checking, and your team’s time is redirected to higher-value work, including implementing the other best practices in this article. Trustpair has blocked 100% of payment fraud attempts for its customers since deployment.
For a deeper look at how supplier management differs from procurement, see our explainer on the key differences between procurement and supplier management.