Automated AP’s Future: Sustainability Screens and ‘Know Your Vendor’ Checks

Accounts payable (AP) automation, the consumerization of B2B payments and other trends that were big in 2021 are going to continue well into the future.

“That’s not a ‘2021 and we’re done,’” PairSoft CEO Matt Cotter told PYMNTS. “Consumerization is going to be a 10-year journey for us, where we’re continually modifying, tweaking, playing with the [user experience] — and I’m not talking about Pairsoft, I’m talking about the industry as a whole.”

PairSoft is participating in this journey with its end-to-end, procure-to-pay, AP invoice automation platform. Its solution tends to attract middle-market companies with anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand employees — a total addressable market that includes hundreds of thousands of potential customers in North America alone.

Preparing Companies to ‘Know Your Vendor’

Consumerization is only one trend AP teams must contend with as they face an uncertain future. Sustainability is looming increasingly large at many companies feeling pressure to ensure their procurement and payments processes match up with regulations and environmental, social and governance initiatives.

“Don’t care whether you think it’s the right thing to do from a human standpoint or not, you’re going to be told to do it from a government standpoint,” Cotter said. “Just like in the banking world you’ve got to know your customer, sustainability and know-your-vendor world is absolutely going to come.”

Another challenge for the industry will involve determining how to deal with cryptocurrency from a payment standpoint, Cotter said. Paper-based and manual AP processes such as printing checks and invoices are going to go away and be replaced by better solutions.

“Crypto is going to play some sort of a role in the B2B space,” Cotter said. “How? In what space? How do my mid-market customers actually take advantage of that? How can I as a vendor help lead them to that kind of stuff? That’s the kind of stuff that gets me super excited about where we are right now.”

Serving Mission-Driven Organizations

Cotter said PairSoft itself will continue to make operational decisions based upon how it serves nonprofits, higher education, healthcare manufacturers and healthcare distributors — sectors in which it has a strong foothold. Within the company, leaders often talk about how the efficiencies the platform provides can translate into extra money to spend on scholarships, healthcare supplies and research.

“We have organizations as customers that have trusted us to help them with this process that are very mission-driven,” Cotter said.

Entering an Exciting Year

Cotter said he expects PairSoft will continue to lean heavily into those sectors. He noted that these are massive markets, the company has customer references there, the markets are unique enough that they’d be difficult for others to enter, and the work done in these markets keeps PairSoft’s employees inspired while doing their own work remotely.

The company will continue building its end-to-end, procure-to-pay platform specific for middle-market companies, including adding analytic capabilities.

“Getting the team all moving on the same page, figuring out the right capital allocation from the dev standpoint, and all of the blocking and tackling — it’s going to be a really exciting year for us,” Cotter said.