Moving Toward Seamless B2B Payment

In the B2B world, much is made of pain points and friction at points of contact between professionals looking to buy products and the people who sell them.

In part, that’s due to legacy processes that become calcified, as technology often shines a bright light on what’s broken or merely needs improvement.

According to one company, Entryless, which helps automate the business processes that wend their way between enterprises, B2B would do well to take some pointers from B2C.

“B2B has not transformed,” Mike Galarza, founder and CEO of the company, told PYMNTS in a recent interview, noting that B2B executives “have not had to think like the consumer and the consumer gets money out of his or her pocket and demands efficiency” in the payments process. Within an organization, said Galarza, there can be a “fixed process” in getting payments through the system, processed and paid. The process can be marked by manual data entry, said Galarza, “with one person that’s in accounts payable … or different owners at each step of the process.”

Most recently, the firm debuted its Seamless Payments platform, which, in tandem with its already existing cloud-based technology, extends to accounts receivable and accounts payable. The Seamless Payments function brings invoices into an accounting program, which then can be used to help companies pay bills and also pay suppliers. Having everything move through one platform, the company maintains, helps shorten the time to actually get bills done.

Seamless, Galarza said, can help ensure that funds clear in a single business day, with no attendant float. One way the platform does that is by allowing disparate systems to talk to each other, explained Galarza, a task that is eased by the open network nature of Seamless. “We don’t ask users to change their behavior,” said Galarza. “If they want to work in PDF format, for example, they can do that. There’s no need to commit to separate databases.” The payment process is accelerated because Entryless also connects with banking systems and tax and expense recording, even while payments can be made through the same apps in which bills are initially presented.

Ease and speed of payments functions also stands to benefit certain industries, said Galarza, who went on to list industries that have quick cash cycles, such as hospitality businesses and fast/casual dining enterprises, where the presence of franchisees means that each outlet oversees its own operation (and they also compete with one another).

As for security, the Seamless system uses encrypted data and follows PCI security standards, which in turn govern credit cards and which Galarza said tend to mandate higher levels of data safety than might be seen elsewhere.

In the end, the elimination of much of the heavy data lifting, via manual processes, means that the most time-consuming tasks are removed, stated Galarza. Using an analogy from B2C, Galarza said that he would envision a time 25 years from now when people laugh at the antiquated processes that marked B2B of old, with a manual system “that shouldn’t exist now” but indeed stood transformed by technology.