B2B Payments Makes Waves In $167 Billion Global Seafood Industry

Business-to-business (B2B) commerce has gone increasingly digital during the pandemic, and cybercriminals are seeing this as an opportunity to launch new scams. Replacing cumbersome manual methods with digital payments is one of the first steps firms can take to help provide protection against fraud.

Many companies are lagging in this regard, however. One survey revealed nearly half of all commercial payments are still made with paper checks. Another poll found 81 percent of organizations experienced payments fraud in 2019, and 74 percent of these occurrences involved checks. But businesses are fighting back with new technologies and anti-fraud measures designed to hold off cybercriminals.

The April Global B2B Payments Playbook examines how B2B firms are investing in digital payments and automation to help combat growing threats and why there is still work to be done to shore up security and comply with emerging standards.

Around The Global B2B Payments Landscape

A six-month analysis has revealed that email is one of the most popular ways for fraudsters to steal funds. Business email compromise attacks or capital call scams are a form of cybercrime leveraging email fraud to swindle Wall Street firms and their clients out of an average of $800,000 per incident. The study also reported a 333 percent increase in payroll diversion scams targeting organizations from June through December.

More than 80 percent of businesses said their company’s future is threatened by late payments stemming from inefficient accounts receivable (AR) processes, according to a separate survey. The report found that 93 percent of firms contend with negative consequences due to their AR approaches while 37 percent are unable to accurately predict cash flow. Respondents expected to see key benefits after digitizing some of their operations, including improved cash flows (expected by 32 percent), improved forecasting (30 percent) and cutting down on late invoices (27 percent).

Nacha has meanwhile experienced an uptick in the number of B2B firms making automated clearing house (ACH) payments to vendors using its ACH Network within the last year. This surge has coincided with a jump in fraud, however, and Nacha announced last month that its WEB Debit Account Validation Rule went into effect as an effort to help safeguard transactions on its network. The rule is intended to establish more robust account verification.

For more on these and other stories, check out the Playbook’s News & Trends section.

ShoreTrade On Simplifying The Supply Chain With Speedy B2B Payments

The fishing industry can lack digitization and struggle with unwieldy supply chains — a problem that has only grown worse during the pandemic as businesses deal with strained cash flows. Speedy B2B tools can help sellers get paid faster than the traditional 90 days, although accelerating these legacy payment turnarounds may be met with resistance from buyers.

In this month’s Feature Story, Mark Esterhuizen, chief operating officer at Australian-based B2B online seafood platform ShoreTrade discusses its use of ShorePay, the company’s homegrown innovative B2B payments tool, and navigating payment-related challenges to help get fish to plates faster.

To get the full story, download the Playbook.

Deep Dive: How B2B Firms Are Mitigating Global Transaction Risks

The increase in remote work due to the pandemic has led to a parallel increase in B2B payments fraud, and B2B firms are met with managing security risks as more transactions go global.

This month’s Deep Dive examines how the transition to a decentralized office environment is pushing businesses to work harder to protect their B2B payments operations and how automation can be used to mitigate these risks.

Read the full Deep Dive in the Playbook.

About The Playbook

The Global B2B Payments Playbook, a PYMNTS and Worldpay collaboration, explores how businesses are confronting fraud in the digital B2B payments space as well as how automation and other technologies can help them shore up their security.