B-to-B payments

If e-invoicing were adopted by more organizations, many of the issues that currently cause late payments would naturally evaporate, leaving leaders more resources to seek out and identify opportunities for business improvement in this year and beyond, writes Richard Hurwitz, CEO of Tungsten Network.

If your billing and payments system has API integrations it makes it easy for your most valuable business asset, your customers, to do business with you, writes Martha Salinas, senior vice president at Multi Service Technology Solutions.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has streamlined its virtual cards so that commercial purchasing clients may connect directly to the bank’s virtual card system and create single-use accounts in real time.

While the intermediaries that record and verify transactions such as payments are removed, the remaining parties may not be ready for shifting responsibilities to guarantee transactions, writes Sebastian Venderzeil, a director at Cornerstone.

When taken in the context of the complete invoice and payment cycle, manual payments not only have higher processing costs to the provider and supplier, but also result in delays between processing and making payments, writes Darci Guerrein, vice president of payment operations for GHX.

For all of the noise in the payments industry around transitioning to real-time and same-day digital payments — and in the mainstream media around the bitcoin craze — paper checks still persist as the preferred means of disbursement for the majority of business-to-business transactions.

If we are going to make these global transactions easier for payers and receivers, these incumbents have to accelerate their progress and level of innovation, writes Mike Massaro, CEO of Flywire.

SMBs are choosing virtual cards as their preferred form of electronic payments because they solve many of their payment challenges, while also helping them avoid the costs associated with custom software solutions designed for larger businesses, writes Blair Jeffery, COO of Noventis.

Some firms are investing in technology to help insurance clients shift to paperless payment processing.

Financial technology companies are reinventing every aspect of business finance, starting with payments. Banks have long promised to automate supplier payments for their customers, but have fallen far short, writes Brent Meyers, vice president of national sales for Nvoicepay.