B2B’s New Battlefield Is Everything Before the Button

When U.S. importers logged into the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s (CBP) new tariff refund portal this week, the interface looked, at first glance, refreshingly modern.

The portal is built to process up to $127 billion in tariff refunds the U.S. owes businesses, offering structured fields, standardized uploads and a streamlined process designed to replace years of opaque, paper-heavy compliance.

CBP said importers and authorized customs brokers can now use their Automated Commercial Environment Secure Data Portal (ACE Portal) accounts to file Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) Declarations for International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) refunds.

But for the more than 330,000 importers that paid tariffs, the challenge was never the login. It was being ready for what the portal would ask of them.

The firms that moved fastest were not necessarily those with the largest refunds at stake, but those that had already done the invisible work of structuring their data, aligning internal processes and maintaining operational records in a structure and richness that could meet the portal’s requirements.

The lesson here is not about tariffs. It is about how modern B2B systems operate. Whether the touchpoint is a government portal, a marketplace, or a payment system, it functions as the final checkpoint in a much larger operational pipeline.

What determines success across that pipeline is everything that happens before anyone ever clicks “submit.”

See also: It’s Level 3 or Bust as Visa’s Interchange Shift Rewires B2B Data

Data Readiness as Compliance Function

In practice, the CBP’s tariff refund portal functions as a validation engine, enforcing strict requirements on data accuracy, formatting and completeness. It assumes that the submitting organization has already reconciled its internal records to a high degree of precision.

In that sense, it resembles a growing class of B2B interfaces that serve as gateways rather than workspaces. They do not help organizations create order; they require that order already exist.

One of the clearest takeaways from the portal rollout is the cost of fragmented systems. Many companies operate with a patchwork of tools — ERP systems for finance, specialized platforms for logistics, custom databases for product information. Each system evolves independently, optimized for local efficiency rather than global coherence.

That fragmentation can become a liability when a unified view is required. In the context of tariff refunds, this meant reconciling shipment data with tariff classifications, payment records and historical filings. Discrepancies that had been tolerable in day-to-day operations could suddenly became blockers.

These problems and hurdles are not merely technical; they are also organizational. Data fragmentation often mirrors organizational silos, where different teams operate with their own systems, priorities and definitions.

PYMNTS Intelligence found in December, for example, that 66% of accounts payable teams saw an increase in manual workload over the prior year.

In this environment, the competitive advantage shifts decisively away from the interface and toward preparation. Companies that succeed are not those that navigate the portal most efficiently, but those that arrive at it with the cleanest, most coherent datasets and the clearest internal alignment.

This reframes what “enablement” means. It is no longer sufficient to provide users with access and instructions. True enablement lies in equipping them to meet the system’s implicit demands: data integrity, cross-functional coordination and anticipatory compliance.

New data in the “2025–2026 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index: North America Edition,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa, reveals a widening performance gap between firms that have modernized their receivables and working capital infrastructure and those that continue to rely on manual, legacy processes.

See also: Cross-Border Payments Hit a New Bottleneck at the Data Border

Workflow Tooling as Infrastructure

Walmart, Target and Nike are reportedly expecting some of the biggest refunds, owed $10.2 billion, $2.2 billion and $1 billion, respectively. FedEx and DHL have started filing claims, while UPS has said it will work to request and retrieve refunds from the government on customers’ behalf for shipments where UPS was the company of record.

By the time 2025 was winding down, 47% of goods product leaders surveyed by PYMNTS said tariffs were mostly or completely negative for their company finances, while 88% were still anticipating supply chain disruptions. At the same time, around two-thirds of goods firms and 80% of services firms said tariffs could eventually bolster supply chain resilience.

And if the CBP refund portal is the last mile, it also shows how competitive advantage is shifting upstream. The organizations that succeed are those that invest in what might be called pre-submission intelligence — the ability to understand, structure and validate their data before it encounters an external system.

This can require greater visibility across workflows, the ability to trace how information moves through an organization, and mechanisms for identifying inconsistencies early. It may also require a cultural shift, where data is treated not as a byproduct of operations but as a strategic asset.

Data readiness and ensuring that information is accurate, structured, and accessible at all times has effectively become a new compliance function. Every transaction, every update, every classification decision contributes to a dataset that may eventually be tested against an external system. By the time that test occurs, it is too late to fix foundational issues without significant cost.

After all, in a world where clicking “pay” is the easy part, the real work and the real differentiation increasingly now lies in everything else that comes before.