A new survey from Corpay, the S&P 500-listed corporate payments group, has found that the majority of UK finance teams are losing the equivalent of a full working day each week to manual administrative tasks. The research, conducted among 300 UK chief financial officers, found that 86% of finance teams spend six or more hours per person, per week on administration work that the company argues could be automated or redesigned.
The finding is positioned by Corpay as a capacity problem rather than a skills or motivation gap. When survey respondents were asked how they would reallocate the recovered hours, the most common answer was forecasting and strategic planning, not operational relief. That result points to a structural misalignment between where finance headcount is currently directed and where finance leadership believes it should be deployed.
The August angle
Corpay frames August as a useful diagnostic moment. Reduced office capacity during summer leave tends to expose process bottlenecks that go unnoticed when teams are at full strength. The company argues that the return from summer holidays, with backlogs freshly visible, is an opportune window to map inefficiencies before the September trading period resumes.
Piero Macari, vice president of product corporate payments at Corpay, said the data points to processes “that, in many cases, have simply never been redesigned.” Macari, who has held roles at Mastercard and GE Capital, added that the gap between where finance teams spend their time and where they want to spend it “does not close by itself.”
Corpay’s commentary does not detail the specific process categories that absorb the most time, nor does it break down the 86% figure by company size, sector or finance team headcount, which limits how precisely the finding can be applied.
Market context
The research sits within a broader and well-established market argument for accounts-payable automation, expense management platforms and treasury workflow tools. The segment has attracted significant venture and private equity capital over the past five years, with players including Tipalti, Coupa and Payhawk among those competing in overlapping parts of the corporate payables and expense stack. Corpay’s own suite spans fleet payments, travel expense management and vendor payables under its Corpay Complete brand, which gives the company a commercial interest in framing the manual-administration problem as broadly as possible.
The FCA-authorised payment services that underpin Corpay’s UK operations, delivered through Allstar Business Solutions and Cambridge Mercantile Corp., place the group inside a regulated perimeter that some pure-software competitors do not occupy. That distinction matters in enterprise procurement, where treasury and legal teams increasingly require payment intermediaries to carry explicit regulatory authorisation rather than rely on a banking partner’s licence.
The more pointed challenge for the sector as a whole is whether the automation case still needs to be made to CFOs in 2026, or whether the conversation has shifted to implementation quality, data integration and return on investment measurement. Surveys that quantify the manual-hours problem are a staple of B2B software marketing; the harder question is why, given a decade of available tooling, the 86% figure remains as high as Corpay’s research suggests.
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