Like consumers, businesses face similar challenges in making and receiving payments in a rapidly evolving global marketplace.
Although consumers benefit from increasingly user-friendly ways to manage international transactions, innovation in business-to-business (B2B) cross-border payments has often lagged. Yet, the same points of friction that hinder consumers, such as slow user authentication processing and time-consuming cross-border transactions, often limit business growth abroad.
Banks have a powerful tool in granting businesses access to instant payments technology. For example, businesses seeking to penetrate countries with fragmented banking or credit resources can offer vendors instant payments to mobile wallets, if their bank provides B2B payment solutions for new global marketplaces. That makes it simple for businesses to build long-term, global growth strategies, even for regions that might provide banking or payments challenges. When deploying an agile banking infrastructure is as easy as connecting with a bank application programming interface (API), businesses can scale easily, even across borders.
In Mapping The Global Commerce Future Playbook: How Instant Payments Will Transform The Payments Ecosystem, a PYMNTS and Citi collaboration, we examine the consumerization of business payments and how options like instant B2B payments can have a powerful, transformative effect on businesses’ futures.
More key findings from the playbook include:
Banks are adopting customer-centric payments technologies. B2B clients depend on banks to streamline payments processes without compromising security and compliance management features. Customer-centric features, such as instant cross-border payments, allow businesses to efficiently manage revenues and vendor relationships wherever opportunities arise.
Instant payment APIs can improve B2B user experiences. User experience is critical for B2B clients, as inefficient payment processes can be detrimental to sales growth and customer loyalty. 
Instant payment APIs offer the seamless integration of transaction management and user authentication tools into mobile apps and online products that can be customized for the needs of a global customer base.
Friction in cross-border payments can place artificial limits on business growth. The use of multiple payments solutions for cross-border transaction processing can diminish liquidity visibility for treasurers, potentially causing inaccurate financial forecasting and resource misallocation.
To learn more about how cross-border payments innovation may transform the global economy, download the playbook.
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