Basware, the Finnish maker of invoice lifecycle management software, has signed a binding agreement to acquire Trustpair, a French company that verifies supplier bank details before a credit transfer is executed, the companies announced August 26, 2026. The deal takes Basware from checking that an invoice is legitimate to checking that the money reaches the right account. Terms were not disclosed, and the transaction is expected to close later in 2026.
Trustpair targets bank detail change fraud, in which a legitimate invoice gets paid into an account a third party controls. The fraudster poses as a supplier the company already deals with and gets the supplier’s bank details updated in the vendor master file before the matching invoice is released for payment.
Trustpair will keep running its platform and going to market under its own name as a Basware company. Its customers will not have to change providers or systems.
“Approving the right invoice is not enough if the money ultimately reaches the wrong account,” said Baptiste Collot, Trustpair’s co-founder and CEO. Jason Kurtz, Basware’s CEO, pointed to artificial intelligence, which he said “is also becoming one of the most powerful tools ever placed in the hands of criminals.” Kevin Permenter, a research director at IDC, said the combination addresses “a growing gap in finance: protecting the invoice lifecycle from supplier onboarding through payment.”
An invoice platform buys a fraud specialist
Basware is owned by the investment firm Accel-KKR. It claims more than 6,500 customers and data spanning 2.5 billion invoices and 20 million suppliers. The deal follows three acquisitions it made between 2023 and 2025: Glantus, AP Matching, and Redmap.
Trustpair was founded in Paris in 2017 and has offices in New York and London. It claims more than 600 customer organizations, holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications, and is a Nacha Preferred Partner. Nacha is the organization that governs ACH, the US bank-to-bank payment network. Trustpair’s investors include Axeleo Capital, Breega, and Tikehau Capital.
Fraudsters work the window between approval and payment
Invoice controls and payment controls check different things. The first confirms that an invoice exists, matches a purchase order and a goods receipt, and was approved by someone with the authority to do so. The second confirms that the receiving account belongs to the expected supplier. Between approval and execution of the transfer, there is a window in which the bank details on file can be changed, most often after an email that impersonates the supplier.
| Control | Question it answers | Data it examines |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice | Is the expense owed and approved? | Purchase order, goods receipt, matching, approval workflow |
| Bank details | Does the account belong to the expected supplier? | IBAN, legal company name, company registration identifiers |
| Verification of Payee | Does the name entered match the IBAN holder? | Data in the transfer order, at the moment it is submitted |
Verification of Payee checks the order, not the supplier record
Verification of Payee was introduced by Regulation (EU) 2024/886. Since October 9, 2025, payment service providers in the euro area have compared the payee name and IBAN the payer enters and flagged any mismatch before the payment is confirmed. The check runs when the order is placed, inside the banking channel, and covers only the data the payer submits. It says nothing about whether that data is right for the real supplier.
A fraudulent IBAN opened in the exact name of the impersonated supplier therefore passes Verification of Payee. The upstream check that Trustpair sells works on the vendor master file itself, matching the recorded bank details against business identification sources. The two controls sit at different points in the chain, and neither replaces the other.
The companies cite tighter Nacha rules and AI-driven fraud
The joint announcement points to Nacha’s 2026 rule changes, under which businesses that pay suppliers by ACH must have processes in place to catch unauthorized payments. It also cites three market estimates, reproduced here as they appear in the release, without checking them against the underlying surveys.
- Organizations lose an estimated 8% of revenue each year to fraud.
- 75% of anti-fraud professionals have seen an increase in AI-generated document fraud over the past two years.
- Only 7% say their organizations are more than moderately prepared to deal with it.
The deal places supplier payment fraud prevention in the procure-to-pay chain rather than in the banking chain. It fits a broader trend of finance software vendors absorbing control tools that used to be sold separately, and it follows Basware’s earlier purchases in invoice matching and capture. One question remains open: how these private supplier databases will connect to the regulatory verification schemes, which are built around the payment service provider rather than the buyer.