An Industry Insider on Why Once B2B Goes Digital, It Won’t Go Back

With the use of digital payment platforms catching on for B2B payments, an industry insider explains why companies are interested in digitizing and why this will not reverse.

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Business trends can be a fickle thing. Some endure and fundamentally change the landscape, while others peter out and sometimes even reverse. The trend of businesses’ payment digitization falls squarely into the first category, according to Luke Trayfoot, chief revenue officer of Mangopay. In an interview with PYMNTS, he explained that once businesses go digital, they do not go back.

To understand why this is the case, it helps to understand what is driving companies to digitize in the first place.

“People are looking for ways to optimize their businesses,” said Trayfoot. “They’re trying to reduce costs and increase growth at the same time — and technology helps enhance that.”

He added that what it really comes down to is how businesses want to transact. In contrast to checks and other traditional methods, digital payment platforms are fast, flexible and efficient. These platforms can create a seamless, embedded experience in which buyers do not need to go to another website to make a payment. Since these characteristics are exactly what companies want, digital platforms are becoming more popular.

For example, there is a big demand right now for digital wallets, Trayfoot noted.

“[Businesses] want the ability to hold money in, for lack of a better phrase, an escrow kind of capability,” he said. “They’re trying to build that relationship, and so the B2B platform needs to be the trusted source to hold those funds.”

Depending on the use case, however, not every platform will do. A lot of platforms, Trayfoot said, do not comply with regulations and payment licenses, especially as they relate to know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements.

These types of rules and regulations, Trayfoot noted, are only becoming more common and more important. This is why Mangopay built its solution to help businesses easily handle them.

Emerging technology will keep driving B2B’s digital evolution. Trayfoot explained that recent technological advances, such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), will absolutely add value to the B2B space. This is why Mangopay — instead of sticking with the status quo — is actively exploring ways to harness new technology to help its customers.

The firm acquired Nethone, a fraud detection and prevention solution, to better safeguard its payments platform — and similar moves are on the way.

“A few more [acquisitions are] in the pipeline coming out soon, which tie into that AI concept of embedding a level of automation into the business and leveraging no-code tools,” Trayfoot said. “A big thing for us is being able to empower our customers, and layering AI on top of the data is one key way to do this for payments.”