Free Vendor Payment Readiness

The score is the mean of five lookups: entity type, tax form status, banking format, payment method and a country risk label. Each returns a number from a small table in the component, and the five carry equal weight. That is fine for ranking a vendor list and misleading for deciding whether one payment can go, because the dimensions are not commensurable. A missing tax form stops a payment. A payment method that is merely suboptimal for the corridor does not. Averaging them produces a single number in which those two look like the same size of problem.

The arithmetic makes the point. A company vendor with verified banking in the expected format, a bank transfer method and a low-risk country scores 90, 92, 90 and 92 across four dimensions. With the tax form complete the fifth is 92 and the vendor reads 91, comfortably healthy. With the form missing the fifth is 30 and the vendor reads 79, one point under the healthy band and hard to tell apart from a vendor with four mildly weak scores. Read the dimension list under the score, since the ranked actions are the part that says what is actually blocked.

The failure that costs real money sits outside all five dimensions. An email arrives from a known vendor contact saying the bank account has changed, the details are updated in the master file, and the next payment run sends money to an account a fraudster controls. No readiness score sees it, because the vendor is genuine and the record is complete. The control is procedural: verify a change of bank details on a phone number you already held, by someone other than the person who keyed the change, and record who verified it and when.