There’s a sea change sweeping over B2B payments. But this change isn’t being prompted by a new rail. Instead, firms are wising up to the realization that the final step of a B2B transaction is still part of the sale.
“For so long, the act of actually receiving the funds was a complete strategic afterthought,” Kunal Patel, SVP, Payments at Billtrust, told PYMNTS. Companies could perfect their pricing, marketing and go-to-market strategy only to treat cash generation “quite discretely and separately from the core strategy that the business originated with.”
That separation made sense when payment acceptance was treated as plumbing. It makes less sense when every method, term and timing decision carries different economics. The question is no longer how cheaply can a business get paid, but what combination of payment method, timing and economics produces the best customer-level outcome?
“It represents an extension of the way firms view their core business strategy,” Patel said, adding that suppliers can segment customers “by geography, by product category, by margin profile, by payment behavior history” and build different payment experiences around those groups.
The Payment Policy Becomes Part of the Business Model
For years, suppliers optimized nearly everything around the customer relationship, whether it was pricing, credit, segmentation, sales strategy or product mix, but then largely stopped thinking in those terms once the invoice was due. The emerging shift is from accepting payments to designing payment policy.
After all, a supplier does not treat every customer identically when setting price, credit limits or commercial terms. Customers are segmented by geography, product, profitability, payment history and strategic importance. Acceptance is beginning to follow the same logic.
“The line isn’t static,” Patel said. The market is moving toward a “more dynamic, always on, always evolving payment acceptance structure.”
The reason is a simple one: the complexity powering corporate transactions. B2B trade credit is, as Patel put it, “an order of magnitude more complex and messy” than a consumer tapping a phone to complete a purchase. The supplier may be balancing transaction cost, credit exposure, customer retention, payment timing and margin simultaneously.
This makes the best payment method, in other words, a contextual one. Minimizing acceptance cost in isolation can destroy value elsewhere in conversion, loyalty, margin or working capital.
The suppliers best positioned will be the ones with the best underlying decision infrastructure. Patel identified three capabilities: “data fluency, modality breadth, and universal coverage.”
The Payments Moat in the AI Era Is Not AI, but Decisioning Infrastructure
For years, payments technology sold businesses on the promise that they should not have to think about payments. The next generation may be built on the opposite idea, that suppliers may need to think about payments much more because acceptance is no longer merely how a transaction ends. It is becoming one more place where the economics of the relationship are decided.
A company trying to gain share in a high-priority geography may willingly absorb higher acceptance costs if greater flexibility helps win or retain customers. A thin-margin segment may require the opposite: steering buyers toward faster payment or less expensive methods. That makes payment acceptance less like a treasury utility and more like a commercial optimization problem.
It is also where Patel sees artificial intelligence moving from analytics into execution. Instead of buyers selecting from a static menu, a buyer agent could optimize for preferred timing or payment method while a supplier agent simultaneously weighs acceptance cost, margin, credit quality and liquidity.
“We view AI as providing a really compelling event and use case for agents on behalf of the buyer to negotiate and manage the payment in real time with agents on behalf of the supplier,” he said. “That dynamic engagement has never been possible before.”
Payment policy becomes a negotiation layer where, as Patel noted, data fluency means continuously understanding signals such as buyer credit quality, payment behavior, average ticket size, seasonality and the fully burdened cost of acceptance; modality breadth gives the supplier multiple ways to respond; all while universal coverage ensures the policy actually follows the buyer across channels and environments.
Watch the full PYMNTS TV interview with Kunal Patel to hear more about:
- Why payment acceptance is becoming a commercial policy, not a checkout setting. Patel argues suppliers are starting to segment acceptance by margin, geography, payment behavior and strategic value — treating how a buyer pays as an extension of pricing and credit strategy.
- Why the cheapest payment can be the wrong payment. A higher-cost method may still make sense if it improves conversion, retention or share in a priority segment, while thinner-margin customers may require tighter economics, faster payment or different rails.
- Why AI could turn B2B checkout into a negotiation layer. Patel sees buyer and supplier agents eventually negotiating payment timing, method and economics in real time, making data fluency and decision infrastructure more important than simply adding more payment options.
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