B-to-B payments

When we go back to normal, it's our opportunity to start making long-overdue infrastructure upgrades, says Nvoicepay's Derek Halpern.

Fast-moving payments innovation was already threatening comfortable connections between consumers and businesses before the pandemic turned the trend into an outright crisis.

IT projects are under scrutiny due to the coronavirus, not only in terms of budgets but also how fast firms can deploy automation for tasks such as business payments for companies that have turned to remote work.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, it was becoming clear that the work of the past decade to establish the Single Euro Payment Area was paying off with real-time payments networks and opening possibilities for another European payments scheme.

Fintechs, startups and bank-led projects were already working to excise generations of inefficiencies out of supply chains. The coronavirus has heightened the need for smooth payments.

For decades, automated check reconciliation stood out as the lone sanctuary for AR professionals. However, the advent of payment automation indicates that electronic payment reconciliation is more than capable of taking up the baton, says Nvoicepay's Kim Lockett.

The coronavirus pandemic is likely to force a great leap forward in the fight to crush paper checks, which still account for about half of B2B payments, by moving more invoice payments online.

Siam Commercial Bank is partnering with Ripple to provide instant cross-border payments for small and medium size enterprises (SMEs).

In our first episode of PayDirt: A PaymentsSource Podcast, we talk with Melissa Smith, the CEO of WEX, and her colleague Jay Dearborn about the biggest changes in store for transit, health and corporate payments.

Digital payment firms and fintechs are nimble and responsive, but that also creates web supply chain attack risk, says Jscrambler's Rui Ribeiro.

When a business accidentally pays an invoice early, due to inaccurate due dates, a change to the delivery date or some other issue, everything changes, says Celonis' Southard Jones.

Even for companies that support remote work, having an entire staff working from home on short notice opens new complications for B2B payments and accounts receivable.

In a scenario where employees regularly and accurately track and report their business expenses, this continuously updated data helps businesses make intelligent decisions quickly, says Fyle's Yash Madhusudan.

Taking the time to consider which technology to adopt for the new, expanded organization can be a critical success factor in the long run, says Bottomline Technologies' Jessica Cheney.

As we launch into a new decade, today’s new workforce wants, expects and demands easy-to-use apps in the vein of what they’re used to in their day-to-day lives, says Fyle's Yash Madhusudan.

If a checking account doesn’t come with checks anymore, can it still be called a checking account? It’s a valid question that the financial services industry should be asking itself.

Duplicates can take many different forms and can be difficult to find in a manual review process, says AppZen's Josephine McCann.

Operational efficiency has long been the key to selling AP automation, but a growing payment fraud problem and new risk exposures are giving businesses new reasons to digitize payments.

Something as simple as the sale of cheese can show how fear instantly affects the economy, disrupting trade and the transaction fees that processors rely on.

Customer interaction platform Podium has added a Payments feature, allowing businesses to use text messaging to accept funds directly from customers.