If you pay people in many countries, you have likely seen this happen. You ask for a payee’s bank details. They send incomplete information. Then you spend days chasing clarifications with many follow-ups.
Every payment starts with collecting accurate banking details. A payee (also called a beneficiary) is anyone your business pays—vendors, suppliers, contractors, or employees. If you work with around 20 payees, email and spreadsheets may still be manageable. When you scale that to 500 payees across 30 countries, that manual process gets slow, error prone, and risky.
There's a simpler, more secure way to manage payee data. In this article, we explain why collecting banking details gets harder as you grow. We cover the risks of storing those details in your own systems and share some best practices that can help.
Collecting payee banking details gets harder because the requirements multiply, not just the volume. Each new country, currency, and payment method brings different rules for what a valid payment instruction looks like.
A domestic US payment needs a routing number and an account number. International payments need more. A payment to India requires an 11 digit IFSC code. A payment to Mexico requires an 18 digit CLABE number. European payments usually need an IBAN and a SWIFT/BIC code. Some countries also require tax IDs or a purpose of payment code.
Your AP team shouldn't have to know every requirement. A generic request for "your banking details" can come back incomplete, because payees may not know which fields a payment to their country requires. Best practice: tell each payee exactly which fields to provide, based on the payment method, payee type, country, and currency.
The payee type matters too. Some countries ask for different information depending on whether the payee is an individual or a business. In Brazil, for example, an individual uses a CPF tax ID, while a company uses a CNPJ.
When the first request comes back incomplete, the follow up starts. One email asks for the missing code. Another asks the payee to confirm the account name. A week later, the AP clerk is still waiting, and the invoice due date is getting closer. Each round trip adds days and creates another copy of sensitive banking data in someone's inbox.
Storing payee banking details in your own systems makes your company responsible for protecting that data, keeping that data accurate, and controlling who can change it. Best practice is to limit how many of your systems hold banking data at all.
ERPs and accounting systems handle domestic vendor records well. Vendor master records often lack dedicated fields for IBANs, SWIFT codes, IFSC numbers, or country specific tax IDs. Without the right field, banking data lands in the wrong place, such as a CLABE number in a notes field or a SWIFT code in an address line.
Follow one payee's bank account number through a typical onboarding process. The number arrives in an email. Someone saves the attached bank letter to a shared drive. Someone else copies the number into a spreadsheet, then into the ERP. The same number now lives in at least four places, and each copy has its own access rules (or none at all).
Fraudsters know that many companies accept banking details and change requests by email. Business email compromise (BEC) includes fake vendor emails.
They may ask you to "update our bank account."
In 2025, it affected 74% of US organizations.
This is according to the AFP 2026 Payments Fraud and Control Survey. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded more than $3 billion in reported BEC losses that year. If email is your normal process, a fraudulent request looks completely normal.
Treat payee data as an ongoing responsibility, not a one time task at onboarding. These four best practices help keep payee data accurate and secure.
Payees change banks, open new accounts, and (for businesses) merge with other companies. A banking record that was correct two years ago may not be correct today. The more payees you have, the more of your payee data can become out of date. Make updates as easy as the first submission, so payees tell you when details change.
When one person collects banking details, enters them into the ERP, and edits the record when asked, they control the process. There is no additional checks. Let the payee enter banking details directly, and have your team approve each change. That approach separates the roles. Your team stops being the editor and becomes the reviewer.
If payees can send banking details through email, phone, or a portal, your team has to judge every request on its own merits. If you can only submit or change banking details through one secure channel, then any request through another channel is a red flag. A single channel is a simple fraud control that doesn't depend on someone spotting a convincing fake.
A useful test: count how many places a single payee's account number lives in your business today. If the answer is more than one, the process is creating risk without adding control.
A better process collects banking details from the payee. It validates those details before anyone relies on them and then stores the details outside your everyday systems. Your team keeps control through approval, not data entry.
|
Email and spreadsheets |
ERP vendor master |
Self-service secure portal |
|
|---|---|---|---|
|
Who enters the data |
Payee sends, AP rekeys |
AP rekeys |
Payee enters directly |
|
Checks required fields by country |
No |
Rarely |
Yes, when validation is built in |
|
Where sensitive data lives |
Inboxes, shared drives, files |
Your ERP and its backups |
A secure system outside your ERP |
|
Fraud exposure |
High (email requests look normal) |
Medium |
Lower (one trusted channel) |
|
Effort as payee count grows |
Grows with every payee |
Grows with every payee |
Mostly shifts to onus onto the payee |
|
How updates happen |
Another email chain |
Manual edit |
Payee updates, team approves |
Whatever tool you use, look for four things:
Ascendant's Payee Connect is a secure, self-service way for payees to submit and update their own banking details. Payee Connect keeps that data outside your internal systems from the start, so your team spends less time chasing, rekeying, and holding sensitive information.
Payee Connect works inside aPay, our payments platform, and is part of our broader payee management tools. Here is how the process works.
When a payee changes banks, the payee updates their details through the same secure channel. Your team approves the change before it takes effect.
The result is fewer email chains and less sensitive data in your hands. Payee banking details are securely stored outside your systems.
A phased approach lets you move payees over in stages instead of all at once.
Collecting payee banking details gets harder as you add countries, currencies, and payment methods, not just more payees. Email and spreadsheets create extra copies of sensitive data and make fraudulent change requests look normal. Many ERPs lack the right fields for international banking details. And payee data goes stale, so updates need the same secure process as onboarding.
The best practice is clear. Let payees enter their details through one secure channel. Keep the data out of inboxes, spreadsheets, and your ERP. Approve every change before money moves.
Payee collection is one part of a bigger picture. Our platform links payee onboarding with accounts payable, accounts receivable, global payments, and FX. Your team’s data flows straight into how money moves.
If your finance team is evaluating ways to simplify global payments, reduce payment failures, or automate AP and treasury workflows, a conversation with Ascendant can help you understand which approaches fit your environment. Whether you ultimately work with us or not, understanding the available options can help you build a stronger payments strategy.
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A payee is any person or organization that receives a payment from your business. Payees include vendors, suppliers, contractors, and employees. In international payments, banks often use the term beneficiary for the same role.
The banking details depend on the destination country, currency, and payment method. Most international payments need the account holder's name, account number or IBAN, and a bank identifier such as a SWIFT/BIC code. Many countries also require a local clearing code, such as an IFSC code in India or a CLABE number in Mexico, and some require a tax ID or purpose of payment code.
Email is one of the least secure ways to collect vendor bank details. Email leaves copies of sensitive data in multiple inboxes, and fraudsters commonly use spoofed vendor emails to request bank account changes. A secure portal with verified access is a safer option.
Payee Connect is how payees submit their own banking details through a secure link. Payee Intelligence is the validation engine that checks those details against the requirements of the destination country, currency, and payment method. Payee Intelligence runs every time, whether the payee submits details through Payee Connect, your team enters the payee in aPay, or your systems add the payee through our API.