Each month, the team at Eftsure monitors the headlines for the latest accounts payable (AP) and security news. We bring you all the essential stories in our cyber brief so your team can stay secure.
ASIC: Scams and governance failures dominate half-year misconduct report
ASIC's latest misconduct report shows scams made up nearly one in five of the 9,807 reports it received between January and June 2026, with governance failures and retail investor issues together accounting for more than four in five of all matters raised.
Chair Sarah Court said public tip-offs remain critical to identifying emerging risks, including increasingly sophisticated pump-and-dump scams using fake celebrity endorsements. The findings reinforce that scam exposure now sits alongside governance and internal-controls failures as a top-line regulatory concern, not a side issue for finance teams.
WA court ruling puts payment-verification burden on the payer
A Western Australian court has ruled that a business which paid a fraudulent invoice must pay its contractor again in full, after finding it failed to independently verify changed bank details, via itbrief.com.au's coverage of the Mobius Group v Inoteq ruling.
Attackers had compromised Inoteq's email, intercepted a legitimate invoice and altered the BSB and account number before Mobius Group paid AUD$235,400 into the fraudulent account. The court found the payer, not the compromised business, bore the loss. The ruling sharpens the stakes on verification: an unverified bank-detail change is increasingly being treated as the payer's failure, not just the fraudster's crime.
Whanganui council pays NZ$309,654 to scammers via altered invoice
Whanganui District Council paid NZ$309,654 to scammers after fraudsters compromised a supplier email account and altered an invoice, according to the New Zealand Herald.
The council recovered part of the loss through insurance and supplier goodwill, but the incident highlights how local government remains a target for invoice fraud. For finance teams, it's another reminder that even routine, recurring supplier payments need an independent verification step before a bank-detail change is trusted.
EY: Autonomous AI adoption is outpacing governance
A new EY survey finds that businesses are rolling out autonomous, agentic AI faster than they can build the oversight to govern it, opening a widening AI governance gap.
The survey found many organisations lack clear ownership, monitoring or escalation paths for decisions AI agents make independently, including in finance workflows. In other words, the tools moving fastest into accounts payable and payment approval are often the ones with the least defined guardrails. For finance leaders, the findings reinforce the need for clear human-in-the-loop checkpoints before agentic tools touch payment decisions.
Review: human error drives 85% of cyber insurance losses
Resilience's Midyear Cyber Risk Report, covered by CFO Dive, found human error was behind 85.3% of the cyber insurance losses in its claims portfolio during the first half of 2026, up from 17.7% two years earlier.
The insurer says AI is sharpening social engineering across the board, from phishing emails to voice deepfakes, making attacks more convincing than routine training can keep pace with. The findings reinforce that technical controls alone won't close the gap: verification steps that don't rely on a single human judgement call are becoming the more reliable defence for high-value payment approvals.
Gartner: CFOs must bring more discipline to AI investments
A new Gartner survey of 160 senior finance leaders finds that AI adoption in finance has moved past initial experimentation into a more tactical phase, and CFOs now need a more disciplined approach to managing their AI portfolios.
The research found straightforward tasks like data extraction and accounts payable automation typically deliver returns within nine to 10 months, while forecasting and other complex uses take longer. Gartner flagged low AI literacy, not talent scarcity, as the biggest barrier finance teams now face, a reminder that a quick win on invoice processing should not crowd out slower, harder controls work.
