Money moves most efficiently when it flows through the pipes that firms already use.
In every major industry, those pipes are defined by the anchor systems that have long underpinned day-to-day operations.
In manufacturing, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system decides how orders, invoices and receipts are recorded. In hospitals, the patient-management platform dictates the flow of care and the data fields that must be completed before a bill can be sent.
These platforms, along with other core industry technology stacks, encode not only the data models of their fields but also the institutional muscle memory of how work gets done. For all the hype about disruption, the payments industry can frequently be just a guest in someone else’s house when it attempts to deliver working capital and supply chain innovations. That house can be defended by staff who have built careers around these systems, and by companies hesitant to disrupt mission-critical workflows.
Coupa announced Friday (Oct. 3) that it added four new artificial intelligence agents to its platform that are meant to help B2B firms rearchitect their procurement practices. This development shows that a new generation of B2B innovators is recognizing that the fastest way to transform how businesses pay and get paid may not be to sidestep the anchor but to collaborate with it by building inside the architecture that governs day-to-day operations. Rather than treating the ERP or the patient-management platform as an obstacle, they are seeing it as a launchpad.
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Read also: 5 Ways CFOs Are Shaking Off the Finance Function’s ‘Department of No’ Label
Turning the Institutional Anchor Into a Growth Engine
Anchor systems, or enterprise core platforms, arose for various reasons. Manufacturing ERPs evolved to orchestrate inventory, procurement and production schedules. Healthcare patient-management platforms became the single source of truth for clinical encounters and billing. In professional services, practice management tools defined how time was tracked and how clients were invoiced.
But as industries consolidated through mergers and acquisitions, these anchors multiplied. A global manufacturer might operate five different ERP instances across as many regions. A hospital network might merge and inherit three incompatible patient-management systems. Local optimizations, such as a custom approval workflow at one plant or a specialized billing template in one practice group, became entrenched.
For chief financial officers, the result has often been a maze of disconnected processes, including payment workflows fragmented across divisions, reconciliation delayed by manual re-keying, and compliance reporting slowed by opaque data flows.
“A huge challenge for CFOs post-close isn’t just financial reconciliation but knowledge reconciliation,” Metal CEO and co-founder Taylor Lowe told PYMNTS in an earlier interview. “[Leaders] are expected to connect fragmented data across CRMs, file systems, and institutional memory, often under intense time pressure.”
The tension between legacy systems and growth strategies is not new. However, it has intensified as firms expand internationally and pursue digital transformation. In parallel, the last few years have revealed that the very characteristics that once made anchor systems seem like barriers can make them ideal launchpads for innovation in payments.
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Smart Spending: How AI is Transforming Financial Decision Making” found that AI is reshaping enterprise financial management. Among CFOs at firms in the United States with over $1 billion in annual revenues, 82% are either already using or actively considering the adoption of AI for their accounts payable functions.
See also: AI, Cyber Risk and Payments Monetization Put Treasury at the Center of Finance
Winning by Building in, Not Bolting On
By recognizing anchor systems not as relics to be bypassed but as infrastructure to be harnessed, forward-looking payment providers are turning bottlenecks into flywheels.
Perhaps the most underappreciated benefit of working through institutional core systems is access to better data. Payment processes do not happen in isolation; they reflect commercial events, like orders placed, services rendered, or patients treated. When payment providers integrate at the source of these events, they can build more accurate risk assessments, more precise cash flow forecasts and more targeted financing products.
In an era when liquidity management, resilience and transparency are strategic imperatives, the ability to align payment modernization with existing operational backbone is increasingly crucial. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Why 2025 Could Be the Year of the Virtual Card” showed that late payments and cash flow unpredictability remain among the most pressing challenges for businesses, with nearly half of B2B invoices in North America still paid late.
Register for the upcoming B2B PYMNTS 2025 event, “B2B.AI: The Architecture of Intelligent Money Movement,” taking place Oct. 6 to 31.
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