The oldest tension in B2B payments is becoming one of its newest business models. A dollar cannot simultaneously stay longer on the buyer’s balance sheet and arrive earlier on the supplier’s balance sheet unless somebody finances the interval.
And while the modernization of B2B payments is well underway, with checks steadily losing ground to ACH, virtual cards and other electronic methods, the central working-capital conflict remains largely unchanged. Both sides cannot improve their cash position on the same dollar at the same time.
A company buying goods on 60-day terms is effectively receiving financing from its supplier during those 60 days. Digitizing the transaction may reduce processing costs and reconciliation work, but it does not alter that economic relationship, no matter how heavily banks and software providers spend to connect payment systems directly with corporate accounting and enterprise resource planning software.
That tension has traditionally been managed through negotiated payment terms. But payments generate only transaction economics. The interval around them generates financing economics, and that’s something finance leaders and their partners are recognizing as a new working capital opportunity.
See also: Working Capital Is Becoming a Priced Portfolio for CFOs
Faster Payments Don’t Fix Payment Terms
The B2B payments industry spent years reducing the friction involved in moving corporate money. That work continues, but the larger financial opportunity sits on either side of the transaction.
A payment itself is brief. The working-capital cycle surrounding it can last 30, 60 or 90 days.
For buyers, those days represent liquidity. For suppliers, they represent receivables. For banks and other capital providers, they represent an asset that can be financed. And for the software companies sitting between them, they increasingly represent an opportunity to determine who provides that financing and at what price.
There are, after all, several ways to bridge the difference. A bank or other lender can finance the receivable. A supply-chain finance program can advance the money based partly on the buyer’s credit. The buyer can use its own cash to pay early in exchange for a discount. A financial-technology company can arrange funding from a third party.
The structures differ, but the underlying transaction is the same: somebody is purchasing time.
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The “2025-2026 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index,” a Visa report in collaboration with PYMNTS Intelligence, found that 7 in 10 “Adaptive” chief financial officers and treasurers use working capital solutions to pay suppliers faster, stay agile and strengthen supplier relationships in a volatile economy.
That changes how the invoice should be understood. It is not merely an instruction to transfer $1 million on a specified date. It is also a short-duration claim on $1 million whose value varies according to interest rates, credit risk, liquidity needs and the financial condition of the parties involved.
Read also: Agentic AI Could Make Net 30 Obsolete
AP and AR Are Converging Around Capital
One immediate impact is that the legacy boundary between accounts-payable and accounts-receivable software is becoming strategically important. An AP platform can observe when an invoice has been approved, when the buyer expects to pay it and how the buyer has behaved historically. An AR platform can observe the supplier’s outstanding invoices, collection patterns and demand for earlier payment.
Instead of asking a supplier to separately seek an invoice loan, for example, an accounts-receivable platform could offer several payment dates, each carrying a different economic value. An accounts-payable system could allow a buyer to compare the return from paying a supplier early for a discount with the return from leaving the cash in short-term investments.
The PYMNTS Intelligence Tracker “Who Decides Now: How Developers and Tech Teams Are Reshaping the Future of AP Payments“ found in July that 58% of small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) rank integration as very or extremely important when evaluating technology solutions.
Providers that become embedded across invoicing, approval, payment and reconciliation gain visibility into the commercial behavior surrounding a transaction. That information can be useful for underwriting short-duration credit and distributing working-capital products.
The important issue is no longer simply which platform processes the payment. It is which institution controls the decision about when the buyer’s cash becomes the supplier’s cash, and who earns the return for financing everything in between when the payment flow becomes a source of credit data.
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