Corpay, a global corporate payments company, has released new research highlighting a critical “automation deficit” among UK finance teams—a growing gap between the ambition to automate and the reality of fragmented, manual operations.
The report, titled The Automation Deficit, surveyed 150 UK CFOs and senior finance leaders. It reveals that while 99% of organisations have plans to automate their finance function in 2025, progress is being severely hampered by legacy infrastructure and disconnected tools.
Barriers to modernisation
According to the findings, 47% of CFOs cite integration challenges as the single biggest barrier to automation. Other significant hurdles include resistance to change (41%) and concerns regarding cybersecurity and data privacy (37%).
This “deficit” is creating operational friction at a critical time. As businesses approach the end of the financial year, the inability to seamlessly connect systems is impacting forecasting and cost control. While 94% of surveyed CFOs rated real-time oversight of finance and payments as “important or very important,” many admitted that fragmented systems prevent them from achieving this visibility in practice.
The cost of fragmentation
The research warns that reliance on manual processes is not just an efficiency problem but a risk factor. The whitepaper cites external data from KPMG noting that 57% of executives experience core system flaws every week. Furthermore, with UK Finance reporting 3.31 million fraud cases in 2024, the need for robust, automated detection is urgent.
Respondents confirmed that Accounts Payable (AP), expense management, and fraud detection are top priorities for automation, yet these remain the areas most bogged down by manual work.
Piero Macari, vice president of products at Corpay, commented: “Finance leaders are clear about what they want to achieve, but the day-to-day reality inside many finance teams tells a different story. Fragmented systems slow down approvals, introduce unnecessary risk and make real time visibility difficult to achieve. This is the automation deficit in action.”
The report argues for a shift toward a modern, integrated finance stack. Corpay points to its Corpay Complete platform, launched in the UK in 2025, as a solution designed to close this gap. The mobile-first platform consolidates AP, domestic and international payments, and expense management into a single automated layer, aiming to replace manual effort with “clarity, control and confidence.”