The 3 Horsemen of B2B Progress: APIs, Data and AI

The B2B payments playbook has historically revolved around winning on cost. This made the landscape, in many ways, relatively transactional and adversarial.

Buyers wanted the lowest cost per transaction; providers competed on price, volume discounts and reliability. Differentiation was thin, and switching costs, while operationally annoying, were rarely strategic.

But global supply chains, real-time commerce and platform-based business models have changed the stakes. A payment is no longer just the end of a transaction in today’s B2B world. It is a data event, a risk signal, a reconciliation artifact, and when done right, a source of insight that can compound over time.

This, in turn, has shifted the operational focus from fees to flow: how fast payments move, how rich and usable the data is along the way, and how effectively risk can be managed across entire networks.

In today’s environment, the question is no longer how cheaply can B2B payments be sent but how intelligently can firms and providers orchestrate value across the entire lifecycle of a payment. And that orchestration increasingly depends on three interlocking capabilities: application programming interfaces (APIs), data standardization and artificial intelligence (AI).

Call them the three horsemen of B2B payments progress.

More here: Why Messy Merchant Data Could Make B2B Payments More Expensive

From Cost Wars to Flow Wars

APIs are often described as plumbing, but in B2B payments they are more like a nervous system. They transform static rails into programmable infrastructure, allowing money movement to be embedded directly into business workflows rather than bolted on at the end.

With modern payment APIs, a procurement system can trigger a payment the moment goods are confirmed. A treasury platform can query liquidity in real time. A marketplace can embed compliance, payouts and FX directly into its core product. The payment becomes a function call—repeatable, observable and composable. Payment APIs are a key function of embedded finance innovations, too.

Findings in the report, “B2B Platforms Expand Embedded Finance to Enhance Customer Experience, Drive Revenue,” a December PYMNTS Intelligence data brief produced in collaboration with Marqeta, reveal that 54% of all B2B platforms surveyed report direct revenue increases from embedded finance, with platforms generating more than $1 billion annually far more likely to see material gains.

APIs alone, however, are not enough. Without shared data standards, they may simply accelerate operational fragmentation.

See also: Banks Are 2026’s Secret Weapon for Supplier Enablement

B2B payments generate enormous volumes of metadata: invoice numbers, purchase orders, tax details, shipping references and contractual terms. Historically, this data has been fragmented across formats, fields and systems. The result is a reconciliation tax that grows with scale and can silently erode margins.

Zach Lynn, head of customer data and insights at Boost Payment Solutions, wrote in the PYMNTS eBook “Headlines That Will Shape the Close of 2025” that data exchange has become non-negotiable in the payments industry.

“In today’s environment, seamless, secure data flows between buyers, suppliers and financial institutions are essential,” Lynn wrote. “Whether it is enabling real-time reconciliation or supporting advanced analytics, the ability to move and leverage data is now table stakes for any organization serious about optimizing working capital.”

Standardized data can enable straight-through processing, reduce manual intervention and dramatically shorten cash cycles. More importantly, it can allow value to compound. Each transaction enriches the dataset, improving forecasting, working capital optimization and supplier intelligence.

Read more: What Agentic Commerce Can Learn From B2B Payments

Why the Horsemen Matter More Together Than Alone

If APIs are the nervous system of B2B payments modernization, and data standards the shared language, AI is the brain.

Artificial intelligence can change what is possible in B2B payments by shifting risk management, fraud detection and decision-making from reactive to predictive. Instead of flagging problems after they occur, AI models can anticipate them across entire networks.

Crucially, AI thrives in ecosystems where data is both abundant and high-quality, a state only possible when APIs and standardization are in place. As B2B networks digitize, the feedback loops become more powerful. Each transaction not only moves money, but also trains the system to become smarter, faster and with more predictive skill.

In this world, payments are no longer just executed. They are interpreted. In the not-so-distant future, CFOs and treasurers could spend less time troubleshooting payments and more time orchestrating liquidity, optimizing working capital in real time and unlocking new financing models.

As these three horsemen reshape the landscape, they are also redefining what it means to be a B2B payments company.

Investing in APIs without addressing data standards creates technical debt. Standardizing data without leveraging AI leaves insight on the table. Deploying AI without real-time, high-quality inputs produces noise, not intelligence.

The traditional model of processing transactions and charging a fee is giving way to something closer to network orchestration where value accrues not from moving money, but from optimizing how money, data and risk move together.

“In the payments industry today, innovation is not a luxury; it’s a lifeline,” Nilesh Dusane, global head of institutional payments at AWS, told PYMNTS in July.

“Legacy infrastructure simply can’t keep up,” he added. “And the traditional model … those cycles are now too long and too costly.”