Basware Acquires Trustpair: Extending Financial Integrity from Invoice to Payment

A few weeks after announcing our agreement to acquire Trustpair, I wanted to explain why trusted supplier data, invoice integrity and payment assurance must become one connected financial decision.

Over the past few months, I've gotten to know Trustpair's leadership, and the more I learned about the business, the people and the problem they've dedicated themselves to solving, the clearer the fit became. Baptiste Collot, Alexandre Gillier, Simon Elcham and their team built Trustpair around a challenge I've watched too many of our own customers run into: a perfectly approved invoice, and a payment that still went to the wrong place. I've seen it happen more than once. Historically, invoice fraud was the risk finance teams watched most closely, and many built strong controls around it. But fraud has evolved and regulatory expectations have changed, which makes this the right moment to address the problem properly.

First, AI has transformed payment fraud into an identity problem. AI lets fraudsters study how companies operate and target the same suppliers and channels they've trusted for years, with a level of sophistication existing controls were never built to catch. Attackers can impersonate suppliers, manipulate bank details and falsify communications with unprecedented speed, then use a legitimate invoice to redirect funds to the wrong account.

Second, regulators increasingly expect finance teams to prove the right checks happened before payment, and they’ve slowly shifted the burden onto businesses.

Closing this gap the right way through technology, rather than piling on more manual checks, is why we made this move now. This isn't about stepping outside Invoice Lifecycle Management (ILM). It's about delivering more completely on what ILM has always promised: greater value for the customers who rely on it.

An invoice is only right if the payment behind it is right too.

A partnership or an in-house build could only take us part of the way. This problem sits too close to the core of what we do for customers to manage through two vendors and two processes for one decision. And the specialist fraud data, banking relationships, and ownership intelligence that Trustpair has spent a decade building isn't something that can be replicated quickly.

Bringing these capabilities together creates one lifecycle, one line of accountability and one place to assess spend and risk together. It moves Basware toward becoming the place finance goes for the complete financial decision, not just the invoice. And we're committed to keep investing there.

This is the control gap we intend to close.

Because the pressure to do so is only growing. Instant payments are shrinking the window to catch a bad transaction before the money is gone, and regulators are responding in kind. Nacha's 2026 rules require US businesses moving money by ACH to run documented, risk-based fraud checks. UK, EU and ANZ rules now require banks to confirm a payee's name matches their account. France's Sapin II law demands documented, risk-based checks on suppliers. The message, wherever you operate, is the same: prove your controls before you pay, not after.

One financial decision

A supplier may be onboarded by procurement. Its data may be maintained by a master-data team. Accounts payable processes the invoice. Treasury prepares the payment. A banking partner executes it. These may be separate processes, but they support one financial decision:

Should this payment, for this obligation, go to this supplier account right now?

Basware makes sure the invoice is ready to pay. Trustpair makes sure it's safe to pay. Together, we can connect the invoice, the supplier and the payment through one governed lifecycle and make it all just happen for our customers.

The business outcome for the CFO

For a CFO this isn't just about assurance. It's about cash, accountability and the kind of risk the board asks about after the fact. A fraudulent payment isn't simply cash that doesn't come back. The total economic impact is far greater. Finance leaders know the domino effect of fraud: supplier relationships break down, production is put at risk, internal audits start, reputation and morale take a hit. Bringing supplier, invoice and payment assurance together protects assets, replaces manual reviews with automated checks, helps finance move faster, and standardizes controls across regions so they can be defended, not just described.

Trust starts upstream

Financial integrity starts long before an invoice comes through. It begins when supplier information enters the organization. If compromised data is accepted during onboarding or a change request, then every downstream system, process and person may treat it as trusted from that point on. And the odds of that happening are rising. 75% of anti-fraud professionals report a rise in generative AI document fraud and forgery over the past two years, while only 7% say their organization is more than moderately prepared to prevent it (ACFE, 2026). No business likes admitting incidents or near misses, but it's something we all face.

So, trust can’t be a single control. It must be established when supplier data enters the business, maintained in real time as it changes, and re-established before money moves. Checking at multiple stages gives finance more chances to stop a bad payment, and it leaves evidence of the controls applied along the way. That's what compliance actually asks for: controls that are continuous, consistent and provable, not a check performed once and assumed to hold.

Why Trustpair?

We already share customers who rely on both of us today, including Valmet and Danone, and talking to them made the gap between invoice and payment risk impossible to ignore.

And the numbers back it up. Trustpair already secures payments for more than 600 organizations, verifies over 10 million supplier-bank relationships across 190 countries, and reports a zero-fraud track record spanning nearly a decade. This sort of performance at enterprise scale is truly a feat, and I'm not aware of any other fraud prevention platform that claims this. All of this makes Trustpair a natural extension of Invoice Lifecycle Management.

What makes this hard to replicate is not just the data. It’s the years of accumulated fraud outcomes, the specialist expertise, and the intelligence built on top of the proprietary data to power the risk modeling and decisioning. We could add more checks to the invoice workflow, but we could not replicate the intelligence behind them. Basware establishes invoice integrity: whether the obligation is authentic, accurate, compliant and approved. Trustpair extends that assurance to supplier and payment integrity: whether the supplier is genuine, the account belongs to that supplier, and the payment is going to the intended destination. Together, we give finance greater confidence in the complete financial decision.

The strategic value: data, context and intelligence

The immediate benefit is broader protection available from day one for more than 6,500 Basware customers. The bigger, longer-term opportunity is what we build by combining data, context and intelligence over time.

Basware contributes invoice intelligence and supplier context, while Trustpair contributes verified supplier-to-bank-account relationships and fraud-specific intelligence. Individually, each dataset answers part of the question. Together, they provide the insights needed to understand the complete financial decision: what the company owes, why it owes it, who should receive the payment and where the money should go. Connecting these signals surfaces risks and patterns neither dataset would catch alone, helping finance flag risk earlier and spend human attention only where real uncertainty exists. That matters even more as finance adopts autonomous AI, because the quality of AI's decisions depends entirely on the data and context behind them. Our vision is to connect invoices, suppliers and payment assurance through more integrated processes, giving AI the context to know when activity can proceed, when it needs attention, and when a person should step in.

A determined fraudster only needs one control to fail. Multi-layered, always-on protection, the kind we outlined above, is what closes that door for good.

But delivering on that vision doesn't mean disrupting what already works, though. Trustpair will keep operating independently and openly across its existing ecosystem. Nothing changes for its current customers and partners: same choice, same integration options they have today. We're committing to keep investing in Trustpair as a distinct capability, with its roadmap shaped by its own customers as well as ours.

Closing thoughts

If you lead a finance or shared services team, the question isn't whether this risk exists in your environment. It almost certainly does. The question is whether you can show, today, that every payment you release is going to the supplier you think it is, every time, across every invoice, and prove it after the fact if someone asks.

Because the invoice is only right when the payment is right. And that’s why we chose Trustpair.

Watch Basware and Trustpair unpack this further in our on-demand webinar, From Trusted Suppliers to Trusted Payments.