B2B payments no longer work as usual

In order to adapt to changing economic forces, the B2B payments industry must first overcome two key obstacles: modernization and digitization.

This, according to Norm Marraccini, SVP Group Director of Commercial and Retail Payments at FIS, who said in an interview that every company, regardless of size or vertical, has already had to “rethink” its business model, in general. , and how it should work inside its model. Many companies have made their way through supply chain bottlenecks, material shortages and headwinds on personnel amid the pandemic.

“Now is the best time to continue to change,” said Marraccini. Businesses need to think about how to make payments faster, pay employees faster, and deliver goods and inventory faster.

Traditionally, companies have tried to influence consumer behavior, coming up with new technological solutions to influence payments and get ahead of consumer behavior. But now consumer behavior is influencing B2B payments.

And as Marraccini noted, “when you look at some of the changes in the B2B world, you look at some of the digitization efforts that are being made across all financial industries – reflecting all the different ways that individual customers and businesses want to pay. . for articles.

A large number of employees work from home and manage accounts receivable and payables from home, he said. At the same time, they also use mobile devices and tablets to perform their own personal transactions when paying bills, performing P2P related transactions or just shopping online.

“The influence of consumers is pushing the business world to be more user-friendly and to reflect the way consumers make payments today,” Marraccini told PYMNTS, noting that business owners are also thinking consumers. : “How I handle payment as a consumer shouldn’t be any different from how I handle payment as a business. P2P payments, he said, can offer a bit of a “goal” for B2B payments – paying an invoice or having inventory delivered should be just as intuitive and streamlined.

Reduce contact points

Organizations are looking for ways to eliminate manual processes from their workflows, especially paper-based interactions. It is imperative that businesses become more efficient and embrace straight-through processing, where businesses can accept payments in real time without having to wait for ACH settlement or wire transfers. The move towards digitized business is paving the way for greater adoption of virtual cards, especially when used for real-time disbursements.

Marraccini said of the cards: “They offer the fastest and easiest ways to make payments with the least amount of ‘touch’.

When looking to eliminate the scavenger hunt inherent in back-office interactions, companies can take advantage of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) to make invoice processing and receipt much more efficient, which improves company margins.

Illustrating various use cases of technology to serve more efficient operations, Marraccini said businesses should be able to download invoices by pointing and clicking. A wealth of information must be integrated into the invoice to facilitate payment for the recipient.

“As we speed up the payment process and expand the payment terms, there must be options for the recipient receiving the payment to say, ‘I would like my payment to reach me faster, and I’m ready to pay. X dollars and X cents for that, but it must be simple. ‘ This simplicity would include everything from uploading invoices to setting up factoring to arranging payments in different currencies. Ideally, buyers and suppliers should know instantly what is going to be paid and transfer that money instantly, without having to wait months for transactions to settle.

As Marraccini told PYMNTS: “It’s not business as usual anymore. We need to start pushing the boundaries even harder now that we start to emerge from the pandemic… the “user experience” in B2B payments will look a lot like what we do today in consumer payments. “