The Payment Air Gap: Why the "Last Mile" of Dynamics 365 Finance is Broken

We spend millions securing the perimeter. We deploy Microsoft Sentinel, enforce MFA on every endpoint, and lock down our Azure tenants with strict conditional access policies.

Yet, when it comes to the "Write" side of banking—actually moving money out of the ERP—the architecture often falls apart.

While the industry has largely solved the "Read" problem (Bank Feeds and reconciliation are automated via APIs), the "Payment" layer remains stuck in the file-based era.

In my experience auditing enterprise environments, I see a dangerous disconnect. We have built a fortress around the ledger (Dynamics 365 Finance), but we rely on a fragile, often manual bridge to execute the transaction at the bank.

I call this “The Chain of Custody Gap”. It is a structural failure that creates three distinct vectors of risk: fraud, operational burden, and executive liability.

The Anatomy of the Gap

To understand the risk, you have to look at the workflow. Most organizations are using one of two methods to bridge the ERP and the Bank: