Fraud Prevention Tops CFO Digital Innovation Wish List

Companies are focusing technology investments on the systems they deem crucial for the long haul.

Going back nearly three years to the pandemic’s March 2020 start, most businesses across sectors tell PYMNTS that they’ve since been prioritizing investments in digital fraud prevention and risk management solutions.

That’s according to data from PYMNTS’ February 2023 playbook, “Digital Payments Technology: Investing in Payments Systems for the Digital Economy,” which also found that working capital and credit solutions were the second most common organizational tech investment.

Businesses have transitioned through several stages of technology spending over the past three years.

For much of the early pandemic, spending aimed to give companies a buffer in riding out the COVID-19 disruptions as well as insulate them from the next-generation digital threats brought by the lockdown-era’s hyper-rapid acceleration of online commerce.

Today, technology investments are tellingly influenced by concerns about rising inflation and other macroeconomic uncertainties and include working capital and credit solutions as well as innovations to accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) systems.

Nearly four in 10 manufacturers (38%) and more than half of retailers (53%) said the most important reason to invest in working capital systems is to cut costs.

In order to survive the pandemic, nearly one in three companies across surveyed sectors (28%) told PYMNTS they invested in AR innovations.

Forty-eight percent of manufacturers and 54% of retailers said the most important reason for their investments in AR systems were to improve the payment process and maintain business as usual.

Most of the spending to date has been aimed at lowering costs and modernizing business processes, and these goals are also expected to drive future spending.

PYMNTS research showed that businesses are taking the time to strategically re-assess their position within the economy’s digital shift and determine how technology investments can drive their success in this new marketplace.

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