Satori expands OK2Pay for international payment checks

Satori has expanded its OK2Pay platform to cover international payment verification in more than 50 countries, extending the product beyond domestic payment checks.

The expansion addresses a part of corporate payment controls that often remains manual, particularly for cross-border transactions. Businesses commonly verify international payments through email, phone calls and separate processes across jurisdictions, creating uneven controls over large volumes of money.

In Australia, the scale of those flows is significant. AUSTRAC recorded more than 232 million international funds transfer instructions in 2024-25, while imports of goods and services were worth nearly AUD $630 billion.

The updated service allows organisations to apply the same verification approach across multiple countries instead of treating overseas payments as an exception. It is also designed to reduce reliance on staff judgement and manual intervention by embedding checks within existing payment workflows.

Control gap

Cross-border payments have long been harder to verify than domestic transactions because account validation standards, banking processes and internal controls vary by market. As a result, finance teams often face a gap between the scale of international payment activity and the strength of the checks used to approve it.

The issue has become more pressing as transaction volumes have risen and payment fraud has become more sophisticated. For many organisations, overseas payments still sit outside the structured controls applied to domestic bank account changes and supplier payment details.

Gavin Steinberg outlined the company's view of the problem.

"For a long time, international payments have sat just outside the core control environment for most organisations. Not because people weren't aware of the risk, but because verifying those payments consistently has always been difficult.

What we're seeing now is a shift. The scale of cross-border payments has increased, the speed of transactions has increased and the sophistication of fraud and error has increased with it.

The problem is that the control environment hasn't kept up. Many organisations are still relying on manual checks, fragmented processes and assumptions that were never designed for this level of complexity.

What this capability does is bring international payments back inside a structured, scalable verification model. It removes the reliance on judgement and replaces it with consistency.

At today's volumes, even a very small failure rate becomes material. This is about closing a gap that most organisations know exists but haven't been able to solve in a practical way," said Gavin Steinberg, chief executive officer of Satori.

Broader push

The international rollout is part of a broader push to tighten payment governance across procure-to-pay systems. Rather than focusing only on fraud detection after a payment issue emerges, the approach is designed to add checks before money leaves an organisation.

That reflects a wider shift in finance operations, as companies seek stronger preventative controls over supplier onboarding, bank detail changes and payment approvals. Domestic account verification has become more common in recent years, but equivalent controls for international payments have often lagged.

The latest update is intended to align overseas payments with the verification standards many finance teams now expect for domestic transactions. Satori argues that a consistent process across jurisdictions gives organisations a more defensible control framework when dealing with suppliers and counterparties in multiple markets.

The business works with more than 200 clients across Australia and New Zealand and analyses more than AUD $22 billion in transactions each year. Its product suite includes Verify and OK2Pay, which focus on transaction monitoring, bank account verification and payment protection.

The expansion comes as companies face greater scrutiny over payment controls, especially where complex supplier networks and cross-border trading relationships increase the risk of fraud, error and misdirected funds. In that environment, international verification is moving from a specialist process to a more central finance control.

Steinberg said even a small breakdown in checks could have financial consequences at current transaction volumes.