At the 2025 AFP conference in Boston, an expert panel confronted challenges in charting the path forward for business payments professionals in the session “Always On AP: Improving Business Continuity with Strategic Automation.”
In this deep dive discussion led by Andrew Goodman, Senior Payments Product Manager at Fifth Third Banki , along with Michelle Pasquerillo, Head of Bank Channel Strategy at Bottomline, and Matt Hidy, Home AP Manager at Cardinal Health, the trio offered actionable intelligence for organizations striving to futureproof their accounts payable (AP) operations and champion smarter, more secure business payments.
From the outset, Goodman set a serious tone, urging attendees to recognize that robust AP processes are central to business resilience, especially in a world where disruptions from cyberattacks to pandemics have become the norm. “This is a strategy exercise,” Goodman said, emphasizing that continuity planning is no longer optional. “We don’t always think about fraud as a version of business interruption, but it absolutely is,” he said.
Throughout the session, he underscored that both traditional threats and newer risks demand more than stopgap solutions. They call for enterprise-wide alignment and meaningful technological investment.
Pasquerillo drove this point home with sobering data, saying that 98% of businesses report losing at least $100K per hour of downtime on average, adding that in high-risk industries like healthcare and financial services, organizations can lose upwards of $5 million per hour of downtime.
She said these numbers should give every business leader pause to rethink their AP maturity. Pasquerillo warned, “When your AP processes are manual, when they’re fragmented and running on legacy systems, you’re vulnerable to fraud. You’re vulnerable to disruption and downtime.”
AP automation, she argued, is now a strategic imperative, helping eliminate those inefficiencies and significantly reducing fraud risk.
Fraud: The Persistent Threat
Matt Hidy of Cardinal Health provided a practitioner’s viewpoint, emphasizing that when financial disruption occurs, payments are the top priority. He noted that AP teams in healthcare operate with highly sensitive data, making payment security and continuity critical, especially in a complex landscape of operational glitches, technology hiccups, and, increasingly, sophisticated fraud attempts.
Underlining the costly distractions fraud introduces to organizations, a recent fraud attempt “took half a day of several leadership members of an accounts payable team to review,” he said. “We [need to] think about how critical it is to have these tools in place to circumvent these experiences.”
Pasquerillo echoed these concerns, citing the prevalence of account takeovers (ATO) and business email compromise (BEC). “63% of organizations have said that they had some type of account takeover or business email compromise within their organization,” she said, “and that resulted in almost $3.4 billion in losses just for business email compromise alone.”
Automation and vigilant vendor authentication, she explained, offer powerful tools to reduce exposure by “authenticating all of our vendors and suppliers in the network,” and regularly verifying all sensitive data.
The Promise and Challenge of AI in AP Automation
Moving the talk to leading-edge solutions, panelists explored the game-changing potential of artificial intelligence. “AI is playing a very transformative role in our lives. It’s allowing us to be a lot more proactive than reactive,” Pasquerillo said.
She noted that Bottomline invests in AI for predictive vendor acceptance, invoice automation, and fraud detection within its Paymode B2B payments network. The goal? “Try to understand which of our suppliers are more likely to have a fraud attempt on them or are a riskier supplier,” adding, “there’s a lot of work being done in risk scoring.”
Hidy, meanwhile, gave a grounded view from inside a large enterprise, stressing that automation brings both opportunities and responsibilities. “AP automation is going to promise quite a few things. That means more emphasis on the subject matter experts and the process owners to dive into that testing environment and understand the goal that we’re trying to reach. What does that open us up to in terms of other risk and fraud opportunities?” His point underscores that while automation can streamline processes, it also requires careful oversight to manage new risks.
Strategic Optimization, Cultural Change, and ROI
Goodman and Pasquerillo stressed that change management and internal alignment are just as crucial as technology selection.
“Once implemented, employee productivity can increase up to 55% with AP automation,” Goodman said. Yet both technical and cultural barriers, like legacy ERPs, entrenched workflows, and skepticism, can slow or derail success.
Pasquerillo urged organizations to not only “start at the top of the house” and secure leadership buy-in but also invest in cross-functional education. “They need to understand what this means to them and their day jobs, but most importantly, what this means for the organization in gaining efficiencies, driving rebates, and mitigating fraud.”
Why does all this matter at a strategic level? Because ROI goes beyond simple cost calculations. It reflects the full impact of automation on efficiency, rebates, and fraud mitigation. As Goodman framed it, “Ultimately, ROI is a much more holistic number, and when that is demonstrated, it becomes a much easier conversation to have [about overcoming] cultural and technical barriers.”
AP Automation as a Strategic Imperative
While the three companies represented are quite different, always-on AP, fortified by automation and AI, is now table stakes for business payments leaders, regardless of their niche. Fraud, disruption, and inefficiency are not just operational headaches: they’re strategic risks.
“Most of the time, change is good,” Pasquerillo said. “It’s also true that change is hard. The big thing is getting executive buy-in.”
Business payments professionals should heed the panel’s call to action: align stakeholders, invest in secure, data-driven AP automation, and approach ROI as more than a cost-saving metric. The future belongs to organizations that turn AP from a back-office function into a resilient, strategic lever.
i Fifth Third Bank, National Association, Member FDIC