CFOs Payments Paradox: Tap-to-Pay for Coffee, Paper Checks for Vendors

Watch more: Embedded AP Solutions Transform Back Office From Swivel Chair to Command Seat

Walk into the back office of a company with an alleged cutting-edge accounts payable (AP) function, and you might expect to see a frictionless, fully digital operation.

Instead, what you’ll often find looks more like a throwback to the 1990s, with finance teams performing swivel chair maneuvers: Employees swivel between screens, systems, and sometimes literal office equipment to finish the job.

“You go log into a bank portal or another system, or in some cases quite literally hitting print and going over the printer, grabbing checks off the printer and stuffing them in envelopes,” Chris Wyatt, chief strategy officer at Finexio, told PYMNTS.

This tension between digitization on one side and manual payment execution on the other has become one of the great contradictions of modern corporate finance. Despite billions of dollars invested in digitization over the past two decades, the final mile of B2B payments remains clunky, siloed and risky. And for CFOs now under relentless pressure to “do more with less,” that contradiction has become impossible to ignore.

After all, as Wyatt noted, the consumerization of financial services has recalibrated expectations. If corporate leaders can make a frictionless payment for a morning coffee or split a rideshare with a tap, why shouldn’t AP teams expect the same fluidity at work?

Wyatt compared it to navigation: “It would be like saying, hey, is having GPS a nice to have, or is it essential? Most people would say today it’s essential. Sure, you could go back to having a map, but why, when you’ve got all these nice tools available?”

The industry’s response has been the emergence of integrated payables: platforms that embed payment execution directly into the AP workflow. These systems allow users to approve invoices and trigger payments from the same dashboard, often supporting multiple payment methods.

The result of embedded B2B solutions is a growing shift in mindset across the AP function and office of the CFO. Control over timing can preserve cash in downturns. Rich payment data can reveal supplier risks, and efficient execution can free finance staff for higher-value work.

“We always like to stress cost avoidance,” Wyatt said. “Think about those manual repetitive tasks that are expensive for your team. Ideally, it’s probably not what you hired your team to do.”

If eliminating complexity were the only benefit, embedded payments would already be a strong business case. But Wyatt highlighted an even more compelling upside: turning AP from a cost center into a profit center.

“For virtual card, think cash back,” Wyatt said. “It’s so ubiquitous in the consumer realm. It’s highly underutilized in the B2B space. You can potentially take what was an AP cost center and turn it into a profit center.”

The broader opportunity, he added, lies in empowering buyers. “They’ve got the money, they’re making the purchasing decisions, and suppliers are often willing to negotiate. OK, I’ll take a card today versus waiting 90 days for a check.”

What emerges is a vision of AP as a strategic growth lever, not just a back-office function.

At the same time, while one major barrier to adoption remains the question of integration, fears of complexity and resource sink are becoming outdated. Finance leaders often ask providers: Do you integrate with ERP X, Y or Z? But Wyatt stressed the real challenge isn’t simply checking boxes but about flexibility.

“People don’t even know what they’re really asking when they say integrate. APIs, passing files. There’s any number of ways to integrate. Ultimately, it’s like, what does that user experience look like? More importantly, I really think the goal should be more about having this flexible sort of payment fabric that can ideally connect almost any system,” he said.

Wyatt likened it to a universal power adapter: “You don’t necessarily want to worry what country you’re in. You just know it’s got what you need.”

The right approach, therefore, is less about point-to-point connections and more about creating an “easy button” that simplifies complexity for AP teams, ensuring payments flow seamlessly regardless of the underlying system.

“For the most part, the front end, that’s the user experience and that’s great. But ideally, if you’re really going to help these AP teams save time, energy, money, resources, let them do something better,” Wyatt said. “The back-end service has to really do all the heavy lifting.”

That means automating supplier onboarding, running know-your-customer checks, ensuring compliance, reconciling exceptions and keeping payments transparent but effortless.

Looking ahead, Wyatt sees embedded B2B payments evolving from transactional to transformative.

“Things are going to go from transactional and reactive to much more collaborative and predictive,” he said.

One change will be in transparency. “There’s going to be technology plays that create a transparency level that doesn’t exist today. And that could be something that lands on a blockchain, that is immutable and technically anybody could have access to it.”

Another shift will be financial flexibility. AP teams will gain a toolkit of options, from cards and financing to discounting, that can be dynamically applied depending on cash flow and supplier preferences.

And as systems become more interconnected, ecosystem effects will accelerate. Wyatt anticipated “more of these interconnected systems” breaking down silos and reshaping supply chains.

Finally, artificial intelligence (AI) looms as a transformative force. “I do think you’re going to see the rise of agentic payables,” Wyatt predicted. AI models may not replace humans, but they’ll act as copilots by flagging anomalies, predicting supplier needs, and automating routine tasks.

All of these shifts point to a new mandate for the office of the CFO. No longer just guardians of the ledger, finance teams will play a central role in driving supplier collaboration, optimizing working capital, and even generating revenue.

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