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What is Happening in the B2B Payment World in 2021?

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What is Happening in the B2B Payment World in 2021?

2020 was such an unexpected year. Even if you saw the pandemic coming, I doubt anyone would have guessed in March that we’d still be talking about it in 2021. Or grasped how much it would change pretty much everything. With that mindset, it almost seems ironic to make predictions. Still, some clear trends in B2B payments have emerged from the year’s events and are likely to unfold in the next twelve months. These are some of the trends that I see taking the driver’s seat in payment automation this year:

Checks Payments are Losing their Luster

The payment automation business case has largely focused on cost savings and AP efficiency. COVID-19 and remote work bolstered that business case—for safety purposes, many companies still hesitate to send employees to the office to cut checks. But what we’re hearing even more is that their suppliers don’t want to receive checks, and they’re asking buyers to start making payments by ACH. With suppliers adopting digital payments at a more significant rate, it feels like we’ve reached the tipping point where checks are becoming obsolete on a broader scale.

ACH Pain Hits Home

As organizations pay more suppliers by ACH credit, they realize the true cost of ACH payments and the risks around them. At $.25-.50 per transaction, ACH looks cheap, but when you consider the time, expense, and liability of supplier enablement, the real cost ends somewhere between $1.40 and $3.79—similar to what it costs to process a check. And that doesn’t include the cost of fraud prevention. ACH payment fraud is on the rise—particularly Vendor Email Compromise (VEC) schemes, where scammers pose as vendors and convince AP teams to send ACHs to fraudulent bank accounts.

Most enterprises have mature controls around check processes, and banks offer controls via Positive Pay and Positive Payee. However, those controls don’t always exist for ACH, and banks often struggle to offer fraud protection for this payment type simply because check fraud was the main focus for so long. But now ACH fraud is rising, and the risk is greater than with checks because the ACH payment process is worlds faster. It’s almost impossible to recover stolen funds if you don’t recognize the problem before the funds reach the bad actors. All these challenges are likely to push more organizations toward outsourcing their payment process to alleviate their overworked teams.

Digital Transformation Ripple Effects

We’re likely to see businesses sorting through some ripple effects in 2021. Organizations had to move forward urgently, and there wasn’t time to plan for some of the changes that would normally take time to implement.

There may also be impacts on external stakeholders. I think we’ll see similar ripple effects from rapid, tactical digitization across departments and industries. That will lead to a second, more strategic wave of transformation and automation with solution providers addressing emerging needs.

Electronic Data Speeds AR Processes

One of the hidden reasons checks held onto their popularity for so long is that they’re easy for AR to reconcile. The funds and data appear simultaneously, with the remittance data right on the check stub. From there, AR knows exactly how to apply the funds against their invoices. If they have a lockbox service with their bank, they don’t even have to key in the check details.

Until recently, that simplicity didn’t translate to ACH payments. AP staff would see ACH deposits in their account, but they wouldn’t necessarily be told how to apply them, because the data didn’t travel with the payment. NACHA (National Automated Clearing House Association) and the RTP (Real-Time Payments) network have improved ACH remittance data transfer. Although the number of fields and characters are limited, it’s a big step in the right direction.

Digitization Unlocks Supply Chain Financing

When it comes to supply chain financing, the U.S. is behind the times when compared to Europe, which has had electronic invoicing in place for a while. There’s a massive opportunity in the U.S. to create more fluidity and working capital for suppliers and buyers alike by using data to accomplish a faster and more dynamic kind of underwriting.

Smarter systems with access to the whole data stream—from PO issuing to payment transacting—can support pre-approved discount and financing options. This wasn’t possible in a paper-based environment, but we’ll see more of these offerings as businesses digitize their data.

A Transactional Social Network for Business

It’s becoming old-fashioned to think of buyers and suppliers—and AP and AR—as separate and independent organizations. Every AP team has a corresponding AR team. All companies are both buyers and suppliers. By looking at all connections between them, you start to see the huge social network of finance professionals behind the constant exchange of funds, POs, invoices, contracts, and other documents. However, for all the highly sensitive data, businesses are not equipped to handle these as securely as they should.

Some financial companies are using the B2B social networking concept to build proto versions of a “Facebook for Business” into their product. Still, we have yet to see any with broader functionality or mass adoption.

Whether a collection of technology firms share their vast network, or a single company creates and markets the right solution, the market is ready for a new business standard. Somebody is going to create a platform that brings businesses out of the virtual Dark Age and into a Renaissance—and it will be very successful when they do.

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Josh Cyphers is the President of Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR Company.  For the past 20 years, Josh has managed successful growth for a variety of companies, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies.  Prior to Nvoicepay, Josh held leadership roles at Microsoft, Nike, Fiserv, and several growth-stage technology companies.  Josh is a lapsed CPA and has a BS in Economics from Eastern Oregon University.

AR

How to Create an Enduring Workflow for AR

Please note: Vocabulary in the payment automation world varies. While customers (i.e., clients, buyers) and their suppliers (i.e., vendors, beneficiaries, sellers) are both considered customers to payment automation companies like Nvoicepay, this article will use the terms “customer” and “supplier” to distinguish between them.

Imagine having to switch out old railroad tracks while a rusted steam engine thunders across. Adopting modern electronic payments runs about as smoothly for banks.

When you think about how old banks are in the U.S., it’s an understandable plight. They’ve been running on the same tracks since the first bank’s founding. Additional features, like wire payments and credit cards, were added over time as a complement to the old system. But the rise of nimbler financial technology (fintech) companies has lit a fire under them. Now they face the challenge of converting their processes to electronic means without disturbing their clients’ day-to-day business.

In a way, fintechs have it easy. Their very nature makes competing against banks a breeze, primarily because banks were built to last, and fintechs were built to adapt. They can easily shift gears to meet demand and immediate needs. Meanwhile, banks are frequently caught up in bureaucratic processes that make it virtually impossible to react quickly to problems.

Financial and fintech industries feel the contrast most often when tackling payment security—specifically when it comes to cards. Even though check payments incur 25% more fraud instances than card payments, according to the 2019 AFP Payment Fraud and Control Survey, many companies hesitate to make the switch to more electronic means.

Kim Lockett—the Director of Supplier Services at Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR company—offers a glimpse into why companies are hesitating to shift gears: “Fraud is not a new issue to companies,” she states. “But what we’ve learned is that fear of change overrides the fear of potential fraud loss, even among companies who have already incurred those losses.”

With almost 30 years of experience in payments and financial services, Lockett possesses a holistic perspective on supplier expectations for seamlessly receiving payments, with payment fraud protection listed as one of the highest priorities. She’s heard all the horror stories, from a small business whose checks were stolen out of their mailbox and cashed, to a company whose employee tried to use business deposit information to clear her personal checks.

That’s not to say that errors and fraud don’t occur for card payments as well. But they occur significantly less and are much easier and faster to resolve than check, ACH, and wire payment issues.

What’s the Holdup?

In the last decade, fintech companies have improved the tracks on which many accounts receivable (AR) teams function. From providing lower processing costs for card payments to offering user-friendly portals for reliable payment retrieval, fintechs transform painful AR workflows into a functional process.

Meanwhile, banks have just begun to offer pseudo-solutions that appear to be tech-friendly but still run on old tracks. An excellent example of this is lockbox technology, where banks mitigate the processing of check payments and their data for their larger customers by taking on the work themselves. This sort of offering likely extended the life of check payments. Still, it didn’t eradicate the underlying problem: that even though work has been lifted directly from their customer’s shoulders, someone at the bank still has to process checks and submit data for manual reconciliation. The process is hardly automated, and the advent of payment processing technology has all but made the entire process impractical.

Embracing the Future

Of course, the best way to avoid check issues is to avoid checks. These days, electronic payment methods offer higher levels of security. But if electronic options like virtual card numbers are such a fantastic option, why are so many companies avoiding them?

Lockett states: “In general, I think companies are afraid of handling credit card numbers because they feel there is risk involved.”

It’s not the dangers of check payments, but misconceptions about electronic payments that cause companies to refrain from accepting them. Many AR teams rationalize that they’d rather respond to the inevitable check fraud cases they understand than walk unprepared into the relatively unknown territory of card fraud.

When checks are stolen and cashed, there’s very little that can be done. At the end of the day, someone will be out that money. Other electronic payment types like ACH and wire are significantly safer, but can still experience fraud, especially internal instances, such as when a company’s employee submits their personal bank account information to receive company payments. Whether these issues are reversible is dependent on each unique scenario.

Card payments, particularly the virtual card numbers provided by fintech companies, are typically protected by two-factor authentication. Whether this means that AR is supplied with a login to access secure details or a portion of a card number, the information is much more difficult for bad actors to access, securing the payment process and reducing the risk of fraud.

In the end, not every company will have the capacity to accept card payments, so leaving alternate options open like check and ACH truly boils down to how much individual payment providers value customer service.

Taking Suppliers Along for the Automation Journey

In many cases, banks have rushed to cater to customer’s needs, leaving suppliers in the dust when it comes to follow-through on electronic payments. Despite these efforts to change, most larger banks still follow their old tracks, and their customers and suppliers experience the same lack of customer service they always did.

With over 10 years of support development behind them, fintechs have expanded their offerings to suppliers, catering to their specific needs, whether they require something as simple as customizable file formats or a more significant request like payment aggregation. Fintechs that follow through with supplier support are truly delivering on their promise of offering an end-to-end solution. They are building tracks that support the advanced bullet trains that companies have become.

“Ten years ago, companies were reluctant to add virtual card payments to their list of accepted payment types,” says Lockett. “Education, experience, and word-of-mouth have established virtual card payments as a mainstream and relevant way to conduct business.”

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Alyssa Callahan is the Content Strategist at Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR company. She has five years of experience in the B2B payment industry, specializing in cross-border B2B payment processes.