PaymentWorks announced the release of the 2026 Vendor Onboarding and Master Data Management Study, commissioned by PaymentWorks and conducted by The Hackett Group. The research finds that growing vendor complexity is straining the processes organizations rely on to maintain accurate supplier information, manage vendor changes and mitigate payment risk.

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“What stood out in the research is the growing gap between supplier ecosystem complexity and operational maturity.”

Vendor master data stored in ERP systems contains supplier identity information that drives procure-to-pay processes, from purchase orders to payments. As vendor populations and data changes grow, the study finds that manual processes, fragmented governance and uneven automation can create significant downstream inefficiency, cost and risk.

Organizations lack the necessary automation and governance models to manage the function

Inaccurate or incomplete vendor master information creates substantial downstream cost and risk

The findings arrive as businesses and financial institutions grapple with AI-enabled impersonation and agentic commerce, including how identity, authorization and liability are established when software acts on behalf of companies. In that environment, vendor identity and banking information become more than back-office records: they are part of the trust infrastructure required to determine who a business is transacting with, whether information changes are authentic and what humans or agents are authorized to do.

“Vendor master data is the foundation of all downstream procure-to-pay activities,” said Thayer Stewart, CEO of PaymentWorks. “Organizations have either ignored it or decided it’s too hard a problem to solve.

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