The biggest operational tension in finance teams is simple: you want people to move quickly but you can’t afford mistakes or unauthorised spending. Until now, that trade-off has been brutal. Either hand over payment access and hope it isn’t misused or lock it down and create a bottleneck that slows the whole organisation.
Payment Approvals on the Alt21 platform ends that compromise.
Anyone on our platform can set up a payment. But if they don’t meet your criteria, the payment pauses until an admin signs it off. You keep momentum. You keep oversight. And you eliminate the silent risks that normally creep in through well-intentioned workflow shortcuts.
This is the cleanest way to empower staff and still protect the business.
How it works
Payment Approvals adds a single control point that transforms your payment workflow.
Users set up payments as usual. If the initiator isn’t an admin or is an external agent acting on your behalf, the transaction halts until an authorised approver greenlights it.
That’s the entire mechanic: full autonomy to initiate, full control over what actually goes out the door.
The result is immediate:
- Security rises because no payment routes through the system without admin eyes.
- Efficiency rises because admins stop being the organisation’s default “payment machine.”
- Control rises because you determine who initiates, who approves and what standards must be met.
It feels a bit like two-factor authentication for your treasury operations – simple, protective and seamless.
A real example: Avoiding a last-minute scramble
You’re a UK manufacturer. You owe €125,000 for raw materials purchased from an Irish supplier. Payment terms: 30 days. A finance assistant gets a reminder email that the deadline is three days away. They set up the payment on the Alt21 platform right away, because that’s their job.
With Payment Approvals enabled:
- An admin instantly receives an alert.
- They check the details: amount, beneficiary, reason.
- If it all lines up, they approve and Alt21 processes the payment immediately.
- If it doesn’t, they can stop it before any money leaves the business.
The assistant does their work. The admin protects the organisation. Nothing slows down and nothing slips through cracks.
When Payment Approvals makes the biggest difference
Use it whenever the stakes are high and speed matters. That includes large invoices, international settlements or situations where third-party intermediaries, such as treasury advisers, agents or partners, need the ability to initiate transactions on your behalf.
The feature’s purpose is simple:
Eliminate the risk that comes from good people doing the right thing at the wrong access level.
If you have broader or more complex payment exposure across your organisation, an adviser can help you layer this with other controls.
What’s coming next
Right now, account owners can trigger Payment Approvals for any payment initiated by a non-admin user. But we’re not stopping there. Auto-approvals for low-value transactions and multi-stage approval flows are already in development. More granular controls are on the way.
We want this workflow to feel tailored, not generic. So try it, pressure-test it and tell us what would make it even stronger.
Give your team more autonomy and give yourself more control.
Use Payment Approvals and you’ll start that shift today.
