The Next Frontier of B2B Payments

New approaches to B2B payments can deliver more than just operational efficiencies. Artificial intelligence-powered capabilities are enabling companies to do more with their payment data by identifying cybersecurity risks, gathering critical insights to better manage their finances and even executing more sustainable financial strategies. As digitization continues to accelerate across the B2B payments ecosystem, generating vast amounts of data every day, the possibilities of applying AI become greater. At the same time, data security becomes more critical. Organizations need to have the right data-management technology in place to help future-proof their businesses.

Business leaders also are embracing the lessons learned from the evolution of the consumer payments landscape. These days, consumers expect seamless payment technologies at their fingertips. For example, they can hail a ride using their phone and exit the car knowing that the transaction has been completed, with little thought about the payment process itself. Increasingly, employees expect financial processes to be just as seamless and integrated within the business tools they already depend on. “Businesses are run by individuals, and all those individuals are also consumers,” says Craig Vosburg, Mastercard’s chief product officer and head of the company’s global Product and Engineering organization. “Their question is, ‘Why can’t this business process look and feel more like what I experience as a consumer?’ And the answer is that there’s no reason it can’t.”

A Three-Part Wave of Innovation

Companies across the payments industry—from upstart fintechs to market leaders such as Mastercard—continue to innovate and drive B2B payments into new territory. With the rise of application programming interfaces, or APIs, and the migration to the cloud, the steep adoption curve for innovative payment technologies is flattening. The seamless embedding of financial tools through emerging technology is helping to further drive the consumerization of B2B payments.

Meanwhile, powerful technologies such as AI and machine learning are unlocking more opportunities to reimagine B2B payments. Take Mastercard’s cloud-based analytics platform, Global Treasury Intelligence, which uses AI to power quality control of supplier and payment data, giving businesses insight into how and where they spend money. AI will continue to transform finance, treasury, and procurement functions over the next several years, yielding even greater visibility into payment flows to help organizations make more strategic business decisions.

The rise of advanced payment processing capabilities and new automated technologies are further transforming the way businesses accept digital payments. On average, studies show that 60% of AR teams see their current AR systems and processes as frustrating, but new solutions are streamlining administrative tasks to usher in a new wave of efficiencies.​ Rapidly evolving technologies are powering solutions such as the new Mastercard Receivables Manager, which will continue to simplify experiences for AR teams by freeing up time once spent manually capturing and entering virtual card transaction data to reconcile invoices.

A Future of Possibility

Wallace doesn’t expect the rapid pace of innovation in the B2B payments space to slow down any time soon. In fact, as more business leaders understand and embrace the considerable opportunities presented by the evolution of payment technology, he believes the swell of B2B payment innovation will develop into an even more powerful wave. “We’re at the cusp of a significant generational shift,” he says, noting that digital natives are ascending the ranks of organizations and taking on positions of authority. “We’ll see chief financial officers and chief information officers who are more willing to move to better technologies in order to adopt the newest features.”

Vosburg believes we’ll find ways to use AI in B2B payments that we haven’t even considered yet. “We’re going to see more interesting applications of AI streamline manual processes so people can spend more time on activities that add more value,” he says. Looking forward, he also sees an acceleration of advancements. “With the seamless embedding of financial services into existing business workflows, upgrading payments technology will become increasingly mainstream in the B2B world.”