This Week in B2B: Realizing Operational Certainty Through Payments Innovation

The B2B landscape is full of what buyers and suppliers don’t know.

In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, B2B businesses across the transaction frequently find themselves navigating uncertainty. Whether it’s the hidden costs of transactions, the intricacies of payment terms, or the evolving regulatory and technological environments, these knowledge gaps have real-world consequences.

As ongoing innovation helps reshape the marketplace, the complex, opaque and often fragmented nature of B2B is changing. A large part of the change is due to a growing commitment to adopting evolving technologies as well as educating stakeholders that remain stuck on paper-based and traditional processes.

The future is being built on more flexible and dynamic B2B solutions that automate with agility and ensure the optionality and security of B2B payments.

This technical and behavioral shift is reflected in the top themes shaping the B2B landscape this week, which were around embracing the next-generation advances making B2B payments better, the opportunities that embedded payments can unlock, and the importance of smarter supply chain management.

“Almost half of B2B payments are still made via check, which blows my mind in terms of the technology that exists now,” Rebecca Schultz, chief marketing officer at Boost B2B Payment Solutions, told PYMNTS in an interview published Wednesday (Sept. 18) for the “What’s Next in Payments: How Do You Do Digital?” series.

“You can digitize the payment, but if the receiver is turning it into cash and manually entering the data, then the value of that exchange has ended,” Schultz explained, noting that true success comes from digitizing every step of the payment process, ensuring a seamless flow of information from end to end.

After years of being bogged down by manual work and fragmented workflows, technologies like robotic process automation are helping modernize accounts payable and receivable departments. Their implementation requires minimal labor and results in a productivity lift.

With the advent of new B2B technologies, payment methods, and the complexity of global supply chains, PYMNTS analyzed Wednesday how chief product officers across the payments industry face unprecedented challenges and opportunities in ensuring their product strategies keep up with the pace of change and propel growth and innovation.

As B2B payments go more digital, they are also becoming increasingly embedded.

Brex launched an embedded B2B payments solution Wednesday that complements the company’s corporate card and spend management platform for startups and enterprises. The day before, Capchase and Stripe partnered to offer a B2B buy now, pay later (BNPL) payment method in the United States.

In other Stripe B2B BNLP news, Mondu said Sept. 11 that its new Stripe integration allows B2B merchants and marketplaces to offer Mondu’s BNPL options through their existing Stripe setup. This “Mondu via Stripe” offering is now available to businesses in the Netherlands, Germany and France, and it will expand to more markets soon.

Wells Fargo introduced specialized APIs Tuesday (Sept. 17) tailored for its commercial banking clients. They provide clients real-time, on-demand information so they can efficiently and seamlessly manage inventory, supply chain and payments.

Also on Tuesday, TurboTax maker Intuit debuted a new product suite for mid-market businesses. Intuit Enterprise Suite is designed to serve an $89 billion total addressable market of larger, mid-market businesses whose needs become more complex as they scale.

As B2B payments evolve, so too are the roles of the executives tasked with making and managing them. In an era of rapid technological and data advancement, corporate treasurers find themselves at the forefront of change in their own roles and responsibilities.

As two J.P. Morgan executives, Maria Chavez, head of payments for core middle market and specialized industries, and Janette Hutton, head of international payments for U.S. corporations, told PYMNTS in an interview published Thursday (Sept. 19), the cornerstone of this transformation is the increasing availability and use of data, which includes generative artificial intelligence. The fundamental step of identifying available data and its potential applications is crucial for treasurers looking to use analytics for strategic decision-making.

July PYMNTS Intelligence revealed that concerns over supply chain integrity and macroeconomic conditions highlight how larger external factors also remain on chief financial officers’ radars.

And in the months since, supply chain realities have only surged in prominence.

PYMNTS unpacked Wednesday how NASA’s reliance on highly specialized suppliers is emblematic of a broader risk in B2B supply chains — the lack of redundancy. As industries globally contend with increasingly complex and interconnected supply chains, NASA’s experience with a vendor undergoing challenging times offers a cautionary tale about the hidden risks and opportunities for B2B enterprises in managing such networks.

Meanwhile, as international trade becomes more complex, the need for real-time intelligence and innovative financial solutions grows. Businesses can no longer rely on traditional methods of monitoring their supply chains, as the dynamic and unpredictable nature of modern trade demands faster, more accurate data to mitigate risks.

The marketplace is responding in turn. Amazon added a fully managed option to the lineup of supply chain services it offers to sellers Wednesday. The new fully managed Supply Chain by Amazon solution will be available to all U.S. sellers for domestic pickups in October and will be expanded to global pickups by the end of the year.

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