Tungsten Automation is adding payments to its invoicing software. Its new product, Pay+, runs on a core ledger from London-based 10x Banking, and 10x says this is the first time its ledger has run for a company that isn't a regulated financial institution. Pay+ goes live in the UK and the US in the first quarter of 2027, with more countries to follow during the year.
Tungsten, the former Kofax, took its name from the invoicing network it bought in 2022. If you have ever sent an invoice to a large corporate, there is a decent chance it passed through Tungsten's software: it reads the invoice, checks it against the purchase order, gets it approved, and hands it to the customer's ERP, for more than 25,000 enterprise customers in 32 countries. The payment itself always happened outside Tungsten's platform. 10x builds the core system banks run on: the ledger that tracks every account, balance, and transaction, and until now, all its clients have been banks and building societies, including Chase UK and Westpac.
How Tungsten Automation's Pay+ works
Pay+ takes over once an invoice is approved. It uses invoice and supplier data, such as payment terms, supplier history and risk profile, to decide when and how to pay, then routes each payment to a provider and rail across Tungsten's regulated partners. It writes every transaction to the 10x ledger in real time, with provider, rail, payment type, and fees attached, which should clear the backlog of reconciliation work at period end. The ledger runs self-hosted on Tungsten's infrastructure, while banking partners retain control of settlement and clearing. Pay+ also plugs into Tungsten's existing AML, KYC and sanctions screening. Which banks these are is not public yet, and it is still unclear who holds the funds while they move.
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Why an AP platform wants a bank-grade ledger
So why would invoice software need a core banking ledger at all? Tungsten found that cloud-only embedded finance providers offered too little deployment flexibility and weak data governance, and it wanted to own the ledger in its own infrastructure without adding any new regulatory surface. I believe the ledger is also what makes the orchestration work. If Pay+ routes across several providers and rails, no one of them can own the record of what happened; otherwise, switching providers means migrating your history. It also leaves room to grow: the platform can layer on further financial services over time, from core banking features to deeper payment-rail integration.
Tungsten has tried embedded finance before
This is Tungsten's second attempt to move money through its invoice network. In 2014, Tungsten Corporation bought the UK-regulated FIBI Bank for around £30m, renamed it Tungsten Bank and used it to fund early payment on approved invoices. Invoice financing did not grow as planned, and Tungsten sold the bank again in 2016. Therefore, 10x's line that Tungsten can extend into payments "without becoming a bank itself" fits nicely. I see Pay+ as the lighter second attempt: Tungsten keeps the data and the customer, and leaves the balance sheet and the licence to partners. Early payment for suppliers still exists today, now funded by partners, and with its own ledger in place, I would not be surprised to see financing move closer to Pay+ in the future.
