In B2B payments, there’s always a power dynamic between the buyer and the vendor, with the more powerful deciding the terms. Today, though, both sides are increasingly finding common ground.
“Everybody wants electronic payments,” FIS Vice President of Integrated Payables Jeff Johnston told PYMNTS. “Everybody wants to be paid on time with certainty.”
The use of electronic payments benefits both the buyer and the vendor, he added, streamlining reconciliation and cutting time spent dealing with checks and paper invoices.
Making a Digital Roadmap to an Ideal State
Today, mid-market companies are looking to digitize their operations — and payments in particular — and they don’t have the resources to get it wrong.
“They have to get it right the first time, and it can be an absolutely overwhelming task to think about a digital roadmap to get you to your ideal state,” Johnston said.
He recommended that companies think about whether they’re looking to increase revenue or save costs. Companies focusing on a digital opportunity tend to fall into one of two camps, he said. They need more leads, more pipeline and more revenue, or they have all of that in place and need to avoid being overwhelmed by the throughput so that they can execute on what they’ve promised to customers.
Thinking About the Customer Experience
“If you decide that payments is something that can help you as far as automation, the one thing a mid-market company needs to think about is integration into accounting software and [enterprise resource planning (ERP)] — that is the key to actually automating this process,” Johnston said.
It’s also important to think about the customer experience because everyone in the B2B chain is also a consumer and has done business with merchants that offer a tremendous customer experience (CX), user experience (UX) and user interface (UI).
“In B2B, we have to remember that if they’re doing something in their personal life, they expect that to be just as easy in their professional life — if not even easier,” Johnston noted.
Investing Time Today to Save Time Tomorrow
Everyone has learned over the last 18 months that digitization provides resiliency, which has contributed to the ongoing trend. And that wisdom is moving down to smaller and smaller companies.
“If you have 1,000 invoices incoming every month, that’s an obvious need for an automation flow,” Johnston said. “But now you’re seeing companies that are down to 100 invoices saying, ‘There’s an opportunity for me to do some automation.’ The question is: How far down the tail can we go?”
Looking ahead, Johnston said he expects to see continued investment in ways to eliminate manual processes.
“I would just encourage folks, as they think about their 2022 projects, to ask what they can do today,” he said. “There’s still time to act today to actually show in-year efficiency or revenue benefits in 2022.”
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