Who Owns the Pay Flow? How CFOs Balance Contract Cycles and B2B Automation

It is both a sea of change and changing seas for today’s finance teams. Chief financial officers (CFOs) are tasked with battling a volatile business landscape, where few things are controllable, and most are uncertain.

Against this backdrop, wracked by trade uncertainty, tariff whiplash and macro dynamism, traditional B2B payments are coming under a microscope for their paper-based inefficiencies and cost-centers.

Modern CFOs want agility. They want to streamline working capital. They want to reduce fraud exposure and glean insights from every outbound and inbound dollar. And the B2B payments technology is increasingly there to support that vision.

Over the past five years, a wave of new solutions from cloud-native AP automation to supplier-centric AR portals and virtual card ecosystems have reshaped what’s possible between buyers and suppliers on the global stage. The concurrent rise of embedded finance means that payments can now live inside procurement, logistics or ERP workflows in seamless, often invisible ways.

A July report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that, for financial institutions, implementing a payment hub can bridge the gap between an older core banking system and new or recently established payment types.

But beneath this surface of possibility rests a slow-churning undercurrent made up of legacy contracts and entrenched roles across the B2B landscape. The problem isn’t that companies don’t want to automate, but that the contracts they’re operating under were written in a world where payments weren’t strategic. They were transactional.

Read more: B2B Firms Are Betting on Time to Cash to Manage Uncertainty

How CFOs Are Redrawing the B2B Payment Map

As the role of the CFO evolves, so too does the map of B2B payments. No longer an afterthought, payments are now seen as a critical part of the financial strategy.

As B2B payments become more automated, real-time and fraud-sensitive, the path to innovation no longer hinges on whether the technology exists. Instead, it hinges on who holds the pen, literally and figuratively, on the contracts that underpin payment processes.

A move toward stakeholder cost sharing is “marking a shift” in enterprise-level B2B payments, Boost Payment Solutions founder and CEO Dean M. Leavitt wrote in a new PYMNTS eBook, “Halftime 2025: Charting the Future of Payments.”

Ironically, the integration challenges that once defined enterprise software adoption have largely faded. Most leading AP and AR platforms offer robust APIs, embedded workflows, and cloud-native architectures that can plug into ERP systems with minimal disruption.

At the same time, the go-to-market motion can frequently be blocked by contracting cycles. If a vendor relationship is buried in a multi-year deal negotiated by procurement in 2021, it doesn’t matter how good a B2B payment product is or how secure the API is. Firms are sticking with what they are obligated to have in place.

On the one hand, payment volumes are increasing — driven by global supply chains, just-in-time inventory models and a shift toward digital invoicing. On the other hand, companies are stuck using workflows and systems that weren’t designed for this volume — or for modern security and compliance needs. This misalignment can carry real consequences.

B2B payments risk is no longer a back-office headache; it’s a C-level priority, PYMNTS heard during a recent roundtable discussion with Bill Wardwell, senior vice president of payments, treasury and supplier services at spend management platform Coupa, and Katie Elliott, senior risk and fraud officer at B2B payments network Bottomline.

“At any time, when you have paper, you introduce manual processes,” Duncan Lodge, global head of supply chain finance and EMEA head of trade at Bank of America, told PYMNTS in September. “That means someone has to extract information, process it and ensure its accuracy — introducing delays, inefficiencies and the potential for error.”

See also: How B2B Payments Data Turns Customer Retention Into a Growth Strategy

B2B Payments as a Revenue Engine in Uncertain Times

Where once payments were passive, they are now being reimagined as active contributors to growth and margin.

Virtual cards, particularly in AP workflows, can offer CFOs a way to earn rebates on payables — turning a cost center into a revenue generator. The ability to extend days payable outstanding (DPO) without harming supplier relationships helps provide cash flow flexibility, while rebate earnings may add incremental income.

And by leveraging data-rich payment networks, companies can offer suppliers early payments in exchange for discounts — unlocking both savings and goodwill. These mechanisms reduce supplier risk while improving buyer margins, creating a win-win dynamic.

Every transaction generates data. When payments are digitized and centralized, CFOs can harness this data to forecast cash flow, detect fraud patterns, negotiate better contract terms and uncover working capital opportunities. Intelligent payment platforms are quickly becoming insight engines.

As the decade marches on, the question isn’t whether payments will be strategic — it’s who will capitalize on that strategy first.

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