Mastercard Says Embedding Payments Is Key to Commercial Payments Acceptance

Watch more: Need to Know: Mastercard’s Marc Pettican

Few dynamics in corporate operations are as familiar and unchanging as the B2B acceptance choreography.

Buyers negotiate terms with suppliers. Suppliers weigh costs, settlement speed and risk. Banks and card networks provide rails largely in the background.

This traditional dance has historically meant that acceptance decisions were episodic, bilateral and often slow to change. But that structure is now collapsing. Today, the most consequential decisions about how businesses get paid are no longer made at the negotiating table. They are made inside software.

Mastercard has started to describe this shift as “adaptive commercial acceptance” — a model where payment methods, terms and controls flex dynamically based on the workflow, the industry and the needs of buyers and suppliers, rather than being fixed through one-time negotiations and rigid solutions.

“Acceptance is increasingly being decided inside the platforms that corporate customers are operating,” Marc Pettican, global head of corporate solutions at Mastercard, told PYMNTS. “Rather than having one-off buyer-supplier negotiations, those decisions are now being made through ERP solutions, procure-to-pay platforms and vertical SaaS.”

It is a change that has implications not just for card networks and banks, but for suppliers struggling with cash flow, for platforms racing to own workflow and for an ecosystem redefining what acceptance even means.

B2B Acceptance Moves Into the Workflow

The corporate payment is no longer an endpoint; it is a step in a digital process. This is why acceptance is becoming an embedded capability rather than a negotiated outcome. When a supplier onboards into an accounts payable (AP) or accounts receivable (AR) platform, payment options are often preconfigured. Virtual cards, ACH, real-time payments or checks are presented, or not, based on what the platform supports.

“We need to make sure that we are enabling our customers, and their customers in turn, to live where the buyers and suppliers are living every day, which is in those procurement systems,” Pettican said.

Winning acceptance in this context is no longer about convincing each supplier one by one. It is about embedding capabilities “as an ingredient into these decision layers,” he said, so that acceptance becomes native to supplier workflows rather than an exception that requires manual handling.

Still, the path to B2B modernization varies by industry, he said.

“Each vertical has very different pain points,” Pettican said, which is why a one-size-fits-all approach fails.

Healthcare, for example, faces high invoice volumes and working capital strain. Manufacturing, especially in the United States, remains deeply reliant on paper checks and manual reconciliation. Financial services focuses on fraud screening and settlement delays. Retail and technology prioritize speed above all else, while insurance, transportation and logistics are still dominated by check-based workflows with complex reconciliation needs.

The common direction, however, is that acceptance must feel native inside industry-specific platforms. Card-based B2B payments scale most effectively when they align with existing workflows rather than asking suppliers to change how they operate.

Myth Busting Suppliers’ Card Resistance

For all the forward movement and innovation across B2B payments, supplier resistance to card acceptance has long frustrated buyers and payment providers. However, cost alone has never told the full story, Pettican said.

The deeper pain points are operational. Working capital pressure tops the list, while speed is another issue, one that’s compounded by late payments, he said.

“Quite often, businesses go out of business not because they’ve got a bad idea or a bad product,” he said. “It’s cash flow reasons.”

Then there is the grind of operations, like fraud concerns, security requirements, poor visibility into payment status and heavy manual reconciliation.

“If you go into an AP or an AR department, you will typically be faced with mountains of boxes and binders and folders that are part of that reconciliation process,” Pettican said.

What is changing supplier attitudes today is not persuasion, but automation. Acceptance grows when cards stop behaving like an exception and start behaving like infrastructure. Automated receivables, embedded reconciliation and richer remittance data can address the exact pain points that made cards unattractive in the first place.

“It provides a working capital benefit to both the buyer and the supplier,” Pettican said, pointing to faster funds and improved cash flow.

The real unlock can be greater operational efficiency. Tools that automate card exceptions and reconciliation directly attack manual workload, turning card acceptance from a liability into an advantage.

APIs as the New Control Surface

If workflows are the new battleground, APIs are the infrastructure that connects them all.

Pettican described Mastercard’s own Commercial Connect API as “the one front door to Mastercard,” designed to link payment initiation, remittance data, reconciliation, consent and controls across platforms and acquirers. Virtual card rails are embedded from the outset, with the solution planned to support additional B2B payment capabilities over time.

The goal is to remove integration as a barrier, allowing cards to compete on their strengths rather than being penalized by operational complexity. By managing those integrations, Mastercard is doing the heavy lifting so that financial institutions don’t have to, Pettican said.

Data hygiene becomes critical here. Standardized invoice and line-item data enable automated matching and straight-through processing. User experience matters as well. If payment options are unclear or disruptive, acceptance stalls.

As reconciliation becomes automated, the economics of B2B payments themselves even start to shift.

“Cards compete on three things: speed, data quality and risk management, and not just on interchange,” Pettican said.

Faster funds reduce days sales outstanding. Richer data lowers exception rates. Risk management addresses fraud and compliance. When these benefits are embedded directly into AP and AR workflows, cost debates become less dominant than total operational value.

The B2B Acceptance Network of the Future

Looking ahead, Pettican said he sees artificial intelligence accelerating the shift. Decisioning will become dynamic, choosing optimal payment methods per transaction based on preferences, terms and risk signals. AI can also flag anomalies, helping detect fraudsters before damage is done.

Consumer payments offer a benchmark. More than 150 million merchants globally accept Mastercard. B2B acceptance remains fragmented by comparison.

Reaching similar scale requires acquirer participation, standardized reconciliation and broad platform integration. Every new endpoint increases value, but coordination across the ecosystem is essential.