Exclusive: Visa’s Newkirk Sees ‘Breathtaking’ Opportunity in B2B Payments

A $200 trillion opportunity beckons to digitize and modernize payments flowing between consumers, B2C and especially B2B transactions.

Chris Newkirk, Global Head of New Flows, Commercial & Money Movement Solutions at Visa, told Karen Webster that everyone expects to encounter the low-to-no-friction mobile experiences that have become the staples of everyday consumer interactions.

The biggest trend in the space, he said, over the longer term, has been “what we and our clients refer to as the consumerization of experiences between corporates, their employees, buyers and suppliers and the accounts receivables and payables departments.”

The macro tailwinds are there for firms to focus on digital channels and tap into innovations to improve working capital management, diversify supply chains and even turn to generative AI to eliminate manual tasks in the pursuit of improving DPO and DSO.

Typically, and historically, inertia’s been a hallmark of B2B payments, where corporates still cling to paper checks — or they shy away from the technical heavy lift that’s required to shift to digital interactions and transactions.

“But what we are seeing right now,” said Newkirk, “is a pace of change that’s really rather breathtaking.”

The tailwinds are in place, said Newkirk, for commercial interactions to undergo a re-imagining.  Supply chains still are unpredictable.  Higher-for-longer interest rates seem to be the order of the day.  Productivity is top-of-mind for executives as work forces remain remote or shift to hybrid settings.

“What we’re hearing from the commercial side, consistently, from our clients,” said Newkirk of banks and FinTechs, “and what they’re hearing from their [smaller business] clients is that they want purpose-built solutions that enable them to focus on running their businesses more effectively.”  Visa’s own work, in tandem with PYMNTS Intelligence, has found that, as measured in the Growth Corporate Working Capital Index, a third of firms used external working capital solutions to bolster their growth.

Visa’s Approach

Though $200 trillion of total addressable market opportunity is staggering indeed, Newkirk emphasized that Visa is taking a disciplined approach, tackling a “handful” of use cases and innovations rather than trying to be all things to all people.  Simplicity at scale drives acceptance of new payments use cases; acceptance brings buyers and suppliers closer together.

The payment network’s approach, he said, seeks to expand the number of endpoints reached through the Visa Direct network, to grow the range of money movement use cases, domestically and cross border, and to forge new partnerships and innovations (such as Visa Accounts Receivables Manager) that bring embedded finance to buyers and suppliers of all sizes, with speed and security in the mix.

The end result is that corporates have a greater number of choices about how to pay, when to pay and where to pay.  In another example, Visa Commercial Choice Selects allows for the bilateral settling of interchange between buyers, suppliers and banking partners.

Underpinning it all is interoperability, said Newkirk — set in place by Visa’s “network of network” effect, which connects to dozens of card schemes, ACH and real-time payment rails, internationally, connecting billions of endpoints, cards, accounts and wallets, with alias and tokenization safeguarding sensitive data.  Visa Commercial’s latest mobile offerings let clients embed virtual cards into mobile devices and wallets, furthering the consumerization of B2B.

“Visa,” he said, “continues to ship solutions that are ‘built for purpose’ for the future state” of B2B payments, adding that bringing commercial payments fully into the digital age will lead to “business models and drivers of economic growth that were really hard to imagine even 10 short years ago.”