Businesses are investing more than ever in securing supplier payments. Yet another blind spot continues to grow: payments made to individuals.

Freelancers, sole traders, landlords, marketplace sellers, drivers, content creators, platform hosts… payments to individuals are increasing across every industry.

Across Europe, more than 28 million people were already working through digital platforms in 2022, a figure estimated to have reached 43 million by 2025. This evolution is fundamentally changing the nature of the financial flows businesses manage every day.

The challenge is that these payments are often subject to far weaker controls than those applied to traditional suppliers.

When a fraudulent IBAN is registered, the payment can appear perfectly legitimate from an operational perspective… while being transferred directly to a fraudster.

Businesses no longer pay only structured companies supported by easily verifiable legal documentation.

Today, an increasing share of outgoing payments is directed to individuals, including:

This trend is driven by the rapid expansion of the freelance economy and digital platform business models.

The number of freelancers across the European Union has grown significantly over recent years, making payments to individuals a major financial flow for many organizations.

Digital platforms have accelerated this trend through:

As a result, organizations must now manage thousands of individual beneficiaries whose banking details may change frequently throughout the relationship.

When onboarding a corporate supplier, organizations generally perform several verification steps, including:

Equivalent controls rarely exist for individuals.

In many cases, the beneficiary’s IBAN becomes the primary element of trust associated with the payment.

Unlike companies, individuals do not always have:

As a result, verification often relies on self-declared information and simplified onboarding processes.

This is precisely the weakness fraudsters exploit.

The attacks targeting payments to individuals rely on the same techniques traditionally used in payment fraud:

The difference is simple: controls protecting these payment flows are usually much weaker.

Fraudsters first gather information about their targets, including:

They may then:

The objective remains the same: convince the organization to update the beneficiary’s banking details.

The attack scenario is often remarkably simple.

The fraudster contacts the company or platform while pretending to be:

They then request:

Because these requests are entirely consistent with normal operational processes, they rarely appear suspicious.

Payments to individuals combine several operational challenges:

At scale, manual verification quickly becomes unsustainable.

Not every payment made to an individual carries the same level of risk.

However, certain payment flows combine several critical risk factors:

Freelancers are often onboarded quickly to keep business operations efficient.

However, speed can reduce verification of:

Recurring payments often generate a false feeling of safety.

Once the beneficiary is registered, payments continue automatically for months—or even years.

A single fraudulent IBAN update may therefore redirect multiple payments before anyone notices.

Digital platforms process extremely large volumes of payments to individuals.

Every month they must manage:

In this environment, manual verification rapidly becomes impossible to maintain.

Yet the platform generally remains financially responsible when a payment is diverted.

Fraud affecting digital platforms frequently follows the classic Business Email Compromise (BEC) model: identity impersonation, fraudulent modification of banking details, and payment diversion.

Across Europe, beneficiary account substitution schemes have already resulted in losses amounting to tens of millions of euros.

A fraudster gathers information about an active property host using a rental platform.

The attacker then contacts the platform while reproducing:

The next scheduled payment is processed normally—but sent to the fraudster’s account.

The fraud is only discovered after the legitimate beneficiary reports not having received the funds, once the payment has already left the banking system.

As with many payment fraud schemes, detection occurs only after the money has already been transferred.

Even when the platform processes the payment in good faith, it generally remains responsible toward the legitimate beneficiary.

The consequences may include:

As payment volumes continue to grow, manual verification rapidly reaches its operationaSecuring Payments to Individuals in Real Timel limits.

Automated beneficiary verification fundamentally transforms this process by introducing systematic controls before payment execution.

Every new beneficiary or bank account modification can be verified automatically to confirm that the account genuinely matches the declared identity.

Automated verification solutions can quickly detect:

before the payment is executed.

Automation also enables organizations to:

without slowing business operations.

Payments made to individuals have become a critical payment flow for many organizations.

Yet these beneficiaries often receive significantly less verification than traditional suppliers, despite growing payment volumes, increasing transaction values, and greater financial responsibility.

This is no longer a niche issue.

Platforms, marketplaces, and organizations operating at scale must now secure millions of payments made to individuals in fully digital environments.

In this context, beneficiary verification has become a fundamental pillar of modern payment security.