Earnings Season Shows Quickening Pace of SMB Cross-Border Payments Innovation

As earnings season draws to a close, we’ve seen wide-ranging discussions of the consumer, of spending trends, lending trends, tap to pay and BNPL, of cross-border payments and remittances.

The digital innovations and momentum are showing up in the business-to-business (B2B) space, too, particularly as more companies send and receive funds across borders — especially as SMBs navigate international markets and supply chains. A number of providers highlighted the momentum for their own fortunes as they help SMBs simplify and improve their global, commercial efforts and as they pay vendors and suppliers.

Payoneer said in its most recent earnings report and supplementals last week that there are 80 million “underserved” smaller firms around the globe.

Indeed, as noted here, as the pandemic was waning, only about a quarter of SMBs had said that they were satisfied with their cross-border payments.

Payoneer said in its latest quarter that 2 million customers are using the company’s B2B offerings, including currency management and payables solutions (the company supports payments in 190 countries). In the most recent quarter, Payoneer said that B2B volume was $2.8 billion, up 57%.

During the conference call with analysts, CEO John Caplan said that “our B2B business is the growth engine driving Payoneer forward as we serve and capture the multitrillion-dollar cross-border B2B market” and now represents a quarter of the company’s revenues. The company’s earnings materials revealed that revenues tied to B2B SMBs came in at $44 million in the most recent period, up 49% year over year.

Elsewhere, Priority Technology Holdings reported that its B2B-related revenues surged 58% year over year to $22 million (getting a boost from its 2023 acquisition of Plastiq), and helped bolster overall consolidated revenue growth of 20% to $227 million.

Financial platform BILL has also pointed toward a staggering total addressable market; in its fiscal first quarter investor deck, the company said that the global opportunity for B2B payments stands at $125 trillion, as measured in volume. BILL’s wire transfer functionality extends to more than 130 countries.

To that end, BILL said in late September that it was debuting Local Transfer — an international payment option for small- to medium-sized businesses — as part of several new features. With Local Transfer, businesses can make faster same-day international payments to vendors in their local currency without having to work with intermediary banks and pay fees traditionally associated with cross-border payments.

Visa CEO Ryan McInerney said on the company’s earnings call for the September period that a continuing “area of focus is the cross-border B2B space, where we offer significant value for complex payments through both card and Visa B2B Connect.” Visa Connect has seen 40% growth in the number of banks signing on to the non-card based network to enable cross-border payments. Visa Direct’s commercial credentials grew at 18% year over year.