PayMate Expands to Chase $68 Trillion B2B Payment Market

PayMate is expanding to chase what it says is a $68 trillion B2B payments market.

The business-to-business (B2B) payments and services provider — which already has operations in India and the United Arab Emirates — announced Friday (June 9) that it had extended its footprint to the Central Europe, the Middle East, Africa (CEMEA) region, and the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.

According to a news release, the expansion will see PayMate offer its B2B payment automation solutions to small and medium-sized (SMBs) as well as larger corporate customers, letting them use their bank-issued corporate credit cards towards accounts payables (AP) such as supplier payments, bill payments and statutory payments.

“This will help them to make better utilization of their working capital for strategic business growth,” the release said. “B2B payments made in this manner will be settled directly into suppliers’ bank accounts, thereby opening wide acceptance of corporate credit card usage as most of these suppliers don’t accept card payments.”

Rakesh Khanna, PayMate’s chief commercial officer, points to estimates that the CEMEA region accounted for $10 trillion of the $120 trillion global commercial payments volume in 2021, while APAC’s was $58 trillion.

As noted here late last year, businesses can gain more control over and visibility into cash flow through payment automation. It’s especially helpful in making B2B payments, where using traditional back-end workflows and processes can become onerous, Steve Lindeman, chief customer officer at Billtrust, told PYMNTS.

“If your job is to split all that out, it takes time, people and resources,” he said, adding that whenever humans are involved with such complex efforts, the company must deal with the additional costs in time and money.

But with automation, those components, data and, crucially, payments can be “flowed in … and you’ll never have to ‘touch’ it manually.”

Lindeman added that tech-enabled solutions like order-to-cash tools could give executives a view into industrywide best practices and benchmarks such as invoicing and payments and a granular view of business division and subdivision activities are linked together.

“They want to be able to implement those best practices, as opposed to just switching to a solution but doing things the same old way,” Lindeman said. “And your operations can take advantage of the cash being in the right spot.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS research shows that 68% of executives expect to integrate B2B payment innovations into their companies this year.

These executives are seeking working capital and cash flow management tools that will help them get paid and pay their vendors faster and more seamlessly, according to “The One-Stop Bill Pay Playbook,” a collaboration between PYMNTS and Mastercard.