Mastercard and Wells Fargo Target the Friction Slowing B2B Cards

For decades, B2B payments have been treated as back‑office plumbing—necessary, unglamorous and largely unchanged. Invoices pile up, checks linger and reconciliation remains stubbornly manual. The result isn’t just inefficiency; it’s an experience that quietly drags on both buyers and suppliers, with little upside for anyone.

What’s changing isn’t simply the technology used to move money—it’s who is shaping the experience and setting the rules. Beneath B2B payments’ long‑standing inertia, a structural shift is underway that is redefining control, acceptance and value across the transaction lifecycle.

To explore that shift, PYMNTS sat down recently with Mastercard Senior Vice President of Commercial Acceptance Nick White and Wells Fargo Head of Commercial and Corporate Banking Merchant Services Paul Uher.

“Two-thirds of B2B suppliers report that they’re not meeting their buyers’ expectations for their payment experience,” said White, noting that the total addressable opportunity in B2B payments is around $80 trillion.

The significance of that opportunity is not simply its size. It is that the benefits across the market appear to be aligning. Buyers want greater control, security and working-capital flexibility. Suppliers want faster payment, lower administrative burden and fewer late receivables.

Turning to cards as a B2B payment mechanism can increasingly offer them those advantages.

“Nearly half of [suppliers] are saying that they expect to be asked to take card for a B2B payment,” White said.

The evolving role of cards reflects a broader realization across the B2B payments industry: scaling card acceptance in commercial payments is less about technology alone and more about solving entrenched operational friction.

It’s against that backdrop that acquirers are emerging as crucial strategic orchestrators of B2B payment ecosystems.

From Closing the Acceptance Gap to Enabling Seamless Coordination

Virtual cards are often positioned as a silver bullet for B2B payments, but their real value lies in how they reconcile competing priorities. For buyers, they offer granular control over spending, improved cash flow management and potential rebates. For suppliers, they provide faster payments, reduced credit risk and streamlined processes.

The result is a fundamental shift in B2B acceptance, where the focus moves beyond a persuasion process and toward a broader question of enablement: who can make it easier for enterprise buyers and suppliers to transact at scale with less friction, better data, faster reconciliation and more flexible payment choice.

“The suppliers are a lot more in the driver’s seat now for these discussions, as it relates to the operational challenges they’re facing,” Uher said.

One key area of opportunity, he added, is optimizing how virtual cards are integrated into existing workflows—ensuring payments and remittance data flow seamlessly, minimizing manual touchpoints and accelerating reconciliation.

“The last thing they need is human beings involved,” White said, explaining that virtual‑card‑enabled payments remove manual touchpoints from invoice processing, enabling suppliers to operate at scale with faster settlement, cleaner data and more reliable reconciliation.

“With straight-through processing and reconciliation, we can take the payment instruction, settle the payment and move the reconciliation information with no human intervention,” he added.

That is why ecosystem connectivity is emerging as a defining theme across B2B. The opportunity is no longer just to sign up more suppliers. It is to connect the right counterparties, route the right transactions through the right rails, move both money and information together and do so in a way that does not create new manual burdens.

The Acquirer’s Strategic Role in B2B’s Upgrade

If supplier operations are now the battleground, the acquirer’s role necessarily changes. In consumer commerce, card acceptance is table stakes. In B2B, it is still consultative. Acquirers have to do more than enable transaction processing and coordinate a complex commercial system that includes issuers, networks, suppliers, buyers, treasury functions, ERP environments and, increasingly, AI-driven decision engines.

“You need the acquirers. The acquirers have to be in place and have the capabilities in place,” Uher said.

These capabilities are not glamorous, but they are foundational: sales teams that understand the nuances of B2B acceptance, ERP file integration, automated posting, invoice presentment, straight-through processing and the ability to route payments intelligently across different rails. Without those basics, the promise of card-based B2B payments may remain trapped in pilot mode.

Both Uher and White emphasized that suppliers are not monolithic organizations with a single decision-maker. Treasury may focus on working capital, while finance operations may care about reconciliation and labor cost. Providers now need a multithreaded sales motion that can speak to each constituency inside the supplier.

“It is no longer enough just to talk to the person who’s signing off the bill for a payment and acceptance,” White said.

AI Moves From Hype to Real-World Value

No contemporary payments discussion avoids artificial intelligence (AI), and both White and Uher positioned the technology as a practical tool for reducing friction across the supplier lifecycle—applying intelligence to areas where it can drive real operational impact.

For White, AI’s first major use case was intelligence: identifying which suppliers are likely to accept cards, shaping more relevant sales narratives, and helping automate outreach, onboarding and optimization at scale.

“The opportunities [are] endless,” he said, though always in service of a simple goal: “to solve problems, to automate, to scale.”

Uher noted that AI’s biggest immediate leverage may lie upstream, in decision-making rather than payment execution. He pointed to its potential to help suppliers determine “where to route transactions,” deciding when card makes sense versus ACH, wire, or another payment type.

Ultimately, if the two payments executives came to a shared conclusion, it was that the market has moved beyond the question of whether B2B card acceptance matters. The question now is who can operationalize it.

White called the current moment “an inflection point,” citing stronger buyer demand, greater supplier openness and a growing recognition among acquirers that B2B acceptance can deepen merchant relationships while creating new growth.

Uher’s advice to suppliers was pointed in the same direction: engage your current provider, understand what capabilities you are not yet using and plan for the technology and workflow changes needed to make acceptance easier.

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