Targeting the complicated companies that fintechs overlook

Fintechs usually focus on niches rather than trying to be a one-stop shop for every type of merchant. But for Nvoicepay, bigger clients mean bigger opportunities.

Sensing a gap left by payments innovators that are focused on smaller companies, Nvoicepay is focusing on the often complicated requirements of large companies with heavy payment volume and layered approvals.

The payment company’s collaboration with accounts payable company Symbeo, announced Tuesday, is designed to boost automation for active B2B payment corridors, tying invoicing, management and execution together in the same experience.

The target market is different than much of the new business payment plays which have been geared toward small companies or niches, enabling online merchants to source internationally through a blockchain or a cloud. Nvoicepay and Symbeo see an opportunity to reach large corporations, or companies that make or receive thousands of payments per year, often involving different parts of a company with different workflows, points of contact and approval protocols.

Like small businesses, these larger companies cling to checks, a costly habit that's been slow to break.

“The needs are different from the mid-market businesses,” said Karla Friede, CEO of Nvoicepay. “Not just in terms of quantity of payment but the environment. It’s more complex to get visibility for payments, which may be coming out of multiple locations with multiple hierarchies and accounting systems that makes cash management more difficult.”

The two companies are focused on organizations that have $750 million and higher in yearly revenue, with more than 5,000 payments per year. The digital process creates a factory of sorts that can manage payments and back office management through a single location.

“We’re looking at enterprises that are growing rapidly, and nobody wants to add headcount to the back office to manage payment processes,” Friede said.

NvoicePay is integrating Symbeo’s accounts payable automation suite with NvoicePay’s digital payment engine. Symbeo captures and digitizes invoice data from mail, fax, and email, and runs it through Nvoicepay, replacing paper invoices and checks with either digital payments or images.

“It’s not just about processing an invoice but making sure the payment is complete,” said Christy Brewer, a founder of Symbeo.

Nvoicepay's Symbeo partnership follows an earlier collaboration with Viewpoint to digitize payments for the construction industry. That collaboration also targets complex management tasks, tying payments to enterprise resource planning systems for construction companies.

Another collaboration with Coupa Software incorporates supply management, requisition, purchase orders, receiving, invoice reconciliation and accounts payable.

Companies such as Ripple have improved automation for small business payments by using distributed ledgers to remove third parties from processing and other inefficiencies. The imaging and e-payments of a collaboration such as Nvoicepay and Symbeo may not grab as much attention, but it can fill the gap for larger companies, according to Gilles Ubaghs, a senior analyst with Aite Group’s wholesale banking and payments practice.

“A lot of the technology that larger businesses are looking at is more established tech,” he said. “it’s not necessarily old technology, but it’s also not the ‘super cool’ new tech.”

Given the focus on most new B2B technology on smaller companies, larger companies are a growth market. “There are a lot of things that can be improved,” Ubaghs said, adding virtual cards will pick up in adoption as a way to streamline sourcing. “You’ll have ‘payment factories’ at a lot of multinationals, where a lot of processes are integrated into a centralized hub.”