Virtual Debit Cards Top List of FI B2B Payments Priorities

The achievement gap for financial institutions (FIs) seeking to solve their clients’ business-to-business (B2B) payments frictions is glaring. 

Although 66% of FIs perceive the ability to offer clients digital payment solutions for addressing B2B payment frictions as “very” or “extremely” important, only 30% say their current solutions are “very” or “extremely” effective in addressing B2B payments frictions, according to “The New User Experience,” a PYMNTS and FIS collaboration that surveyed 311 financial institution executives. 

Get the report: The New User Experience: Tracking The Consumerization Of B2B Payments 

This varies by client type, with the portions of FIs serving cross-border payments customers, large enterprises and middle-market companies that see digital payments as highly important to their customers being even larger. 

To facilitate the consumerization of B2B payments, 64% of FIs are “very” or “extremely” willing to adopt new technologies. Another 24% are “somewhat” willing to do so. 

The top digital payment innovations FIs are currently pursuing include enabling corporate customers to issue virtual debit cards to their end customers, which is cited by 84% of FIs, and sharing data between accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) to automatically net invoices, cited by 82% of FIs. 

In addition, about three-quarters of the FIs report they are currently working on or planning to work on several other digital solutions for their corporate clients, including a single view of cash for cash-flow management and forecasting, instant digital card issuance to mobile wallets for corporate spend management, automatic matching of payments and invoices, the ability for receivers to choose their method of payment and virtual cards for making payments,