By Anish Kapoor, CEO, AccessPay
Following a tough 2025, doing more with less will be at the forefront of corporate finance and treasury leaders’ minds as we enter 2026, with the drive for automation and optimisation reaching new heights. ISO 20022 will also remain an ongoing theme as organisations prepare for new 2026 milestones. Meanwhile, from a risk management perspective, cyber recovery planning in payments will be a key focus area given the heightened cyber threat. Lastly, I also cover why cross-border payments will be the hot topic to watch next year, as a plethora of new developments lay the groundwork for new ways to make overseas transactions.
The automation imperative
Automation and the drive for operational efficiency are omnipresent themes in corporate finance and treasury, but, on the back of a particularly tough 2025, they will come to the fore next year. The challenges of the past 12 months, including volatile trade conditions, higher costs of doing business, and fragile consumer and business confidence, show no sign of abating. Businesses will be stress-testing their plans and examining how to operate effectively at the low end of their scenarios. Cost control will be necessary as department budgets are trimmed to increase flexibility. This is where automation comes into play: if finance departments are to operate with reduced headcount or scale without increasing staff, leaders also need to consider how to make up that shortfall with technology. Today, the default position when discussing automation is to think about artificial intelligence (AI). Undoubtedly, AI will play a greater role in finance workflows in 2026, though in the near term, I predict its application will be limited to targeted tasks, such as coding invoices or analysing financial reports. AI is not yet at a stage where it can be used for mainstream payment automation. The stakes in business payments are high, with no margin for error, so handing over payment decisions to AI agents is not to be done lightly. Notably, significant automation can still be achieved without using AI. Payments and bank statements can be automated using bank connectivity solutions that connect back-office systems to banks, enabling a two-way flow of information and eliminating typical manual processes, such as logging into bank portals to download statements that can consume up to 25% of a finance team’s time.
ISO 20022: more milestones ahead
From November 2026, ISO 20022-ready payment schemes, including CHAPS in the UK and Swift, will reject payment messages with unstructured addresses. Instead, they must be submitted in either a fully structured or, at a minimum, a hybrid address format, where the town name and country are structured and the rest is unstructured. This is the first step in a series of mandatory data changes over the coming years. For corporates, this is where a failure to get to grips with ISO 20022 could hit them hard for the first time. To date, the first-hand impact of ISO 20022-related milestones, such as the end of the Swift co-existence period for legacy and ISO 20022 payment instructions, has primarily been on financial institutions. This, combined with multiple pushbacks to ISO 20022 timelines, has created a sense of corporate complacency. Meanwhile, the wide variation in how banks are downstreaming ISO 20022-related changes to their corporate customers has caused confusion. ISO 20022 is not a single format; it’s a framework that can be applied in multiple different ways. Multi-banked corporates, in particular, are grappling with implementation differences and different timelines. The key message for corporates as they prepare for 2026 is that they urgently need to ensure they have clean, correctly structured address data in their back-office systems and need a plan to deal with the further changes that are coming down the line. If not, they risk multiple rejected payments, which is painful and costly to rectify. However, ISO 20022 will always benefit those who see it as an opportunity to access richer data to improve business processes rather than a compliance exercise.
Managing changing risks
From a risk and compliance perspective, finance and treasury teams will need to ensure their risk practices and workflows are evolving in line with the continued growth of real-time payments worldwide. The EU’s Instant Payments Regulation deadlines took effect in 2025 and should boost real-time payments across the region. It also introduced Verification of Payee (VOP) checks, effective from October 2025, to reduce the risk of fraudulent or erroneous payments. Payment Service Providers and corporates will feel the impact of VOP well into 2026 as they adapt to new workflows and troubleshoot teething problems. Fraud will also be front of mind. In the UK, data from Cifas’ Fraudscape shows that fraud cases and insider threats recorded in the first half of 2025 were up on the same time period in 2024. Meanwhile, large UK corporates will continue to adapt to the Failure to Prevent Fraud offence introduced by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA). The offence, which came into force in September 2025, is having a significant impact on the existing processes as corporates review and update controls. Finally, cybersecurity has also risen on the corporate agenda following high-profile cyberattacks in 2025. From a payments perspective, finance leaders must ensure they have a recovery plan in place should they be locked out of their systems. This could involve operating a contingency payment system or having a physical paper file to facilitate payments using bank portals. Regardless of the approach, with the UK government consulting on plans to reform late payment legislation, there is diminishing scope for delayed supplier payments. Not having a robust backup plan in case of cyber disruption is unlikely to be viewed favourably.
Cross-border payments and stablecoins
Businesses that operate internationally should also keep a watching brief on the cross-border space, given developments that could in the medium- to long-term change how corporates transact with overseas entities. Examples include the go-live of RT2, the Bank of England’s renewed RTGS in April 2025. The news passed by with relatively little fanfare, but it represents a step-change in capabilities, which, together with the upgrade of CHAPS to ISO 20022, opens the door to cross-border settlement with other ISO 20022-compliant payment systems. The Bank of England is currently reviewing responses to its proposal to extend RT2 and CHAPS settlement hours, which would be a key step in opening up the system to international payments. There is also significant activity in the stablecoin space since President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law in July 2025. This, together with providers such as PayPal launching stablecoins and Stripe facilitating their acceptance, is seeing the cryptocurrency enter the mainstream. From a B2B perspective, stablecoins offer notable advantages for cross-border payments compared to the correspondent banking system: settlement is instant rather than taking many days, and costs are significantly lower. Though, of course, there are complexities to consider, not least the implications for accounting and cash reporting. Nonetheless, with the Bank of England now launching its consultation on a regulatory regime for stablecoins, finance leaders need to determine the role that stablecoins could play in their operations.
