Streamlining B2B processes and solving historical problems has never been more important, or more possible.
This, as current macroclimate headwinds and the state of global trade dynamics have left many businesses keen on ensuring their supply chain continuity, while underscoring the importance of building productive, frictionless vendor relationships.
Fortunately for those businesses, FinTech advancements, future-fit payment platforms and dynamic, next generation B2B marketplaces increasingly offer an emergent opportunity for critical operational and relational transformations, across both industries and borders alike.
B2B commerce, historically rife with manual processes, is particularly ripe for modernization — particularly within the supply chain.
Identifying and Solving for Outstanding Technical Debts Along the Procurement Journey
Businesses everywhere experienced a crash course in the importance of supply chain resiliency over the past few years, as the pandemic wreaked havoc across long-standing trade corridors.
Heavy industries and those businesses most dependent on raw materials and hard goods, particularly manufacturers and retailers, felt this disruption more than most.
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Read more: Manufacturers’ Procurement Modernization Drives Innovations in Purchase Order Finance
Now, emergent technologies and innovations in 5G have the potential to together revolutionize both global trade and supply chains with advances in end-to-end real-time transparency, automated verification, and hyper-rapid digital transaction settlements across next generation marketplaces.
New research in the March 2023 PYMNTS report, “Digital Payments: Modernizing Procurement Processes,” a collaboration with Corcentric, reveals that businesses throughout the economy are prioritizing investments into their procurement functions to streamline performance, as well as increasingly leveraging digital platforms to increase B2B opportunities that can ensure their future success.
The report finds more than 4 in 10 manufacturers (42%) are investing in digital payments technology for their procurement processes, while many other businesses are focused on improving their internal functions for integrating supplier data — such as real-time inventory information and supply chain analytics.
That’s because unreliable payments and erratic, cross-border B2B settlement times and frictions — including opacity around transaction fees — are barriers that can hamstring growth goals for organizations of any size.
PYMNTS has previously covered how operations across international borders inherently add layers of complexity to commercial B2B operations, highlighting that when organizations have aging systems and outdated tools, they are more vulnerable to the historic pitfalls and emergent compatibility frictions of those systems.
Modern B2B Marketplaces Are Rewriting How Companies Operate and Scale
A rising generation of B2B marketplaces are updating traditional business engagements by facilitating the automation of customs and border clearance, while removing historical manual processing frictions and allowing for future-fit payment capabilities that benefit both businesses and their vendor-partners.
Nine in 10 small and medium-sized business (SMB) owners surveyed in PYMNTS’ “AP/AR Quick-Start Guide,” a collaboration with Plastiq, report that all-in-one payment platforms for B2B transactions are able to save time and drive third-party convenience.
Additional PYMNTS research has confirmed that B2B payments are growing increasingly digital across industries.
This changing B2B landscape is simultaneously evolving the expectations of enterprise customers, who increasingly expect to engage with modern solutions that supplant error-prone, slow, and expensive legacy methods.
“People are looking and expecting to get answered immediately, to say yes, please book, I want to pay now, and I want to see where my shipment is along the process,” Raz Ronen, CEO at Wisor.AI, told PYMNTS in a conversation at the end of February.
“At the end of the day, we’re taking a lot of the administrative tasks out of the [B2B] process and eliminating some wasteful human touches that we can digitize … we’re going to procure the carriers digitally, we’re going to pay the carriers digitally,” Royce Neubauer, founder and CEO of the online marketplace Auto Hauler Exchange told PYMNTS earlier this year.
PYMNTS has been tracking the rise of digital B2B marketplaces across various industries, as various future-fit solutions are brought to market to help companies scale by filling in historical mismatches between inventory supply and buyer demand for goods and services, as well as meet emergent behavioral demands by delivering a single platform providing digital financing, invoicing, and payment solutions.
These new marketplaces also come with bells and whistles that reduce administrative burdens and remove manual processes by combining various technologies to increase speed, efficiency, and operational visibility, while simultaneously building greater trust between business partners with real-time settlement systems, remittance networks, and currency exchange platforms that can coordinate and complete complex transactions that historically used to take days, or even weeks, in seconds.
As for how the near-future future might build on today’s advances? Observers believe the rise of generative AI tools and solutions will help usher in a new era of connected trade efficiencies, as well as a new generation of B2B success stories.
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