Today in B2B: Digital Payment Adoption Aids Business Growth; FIs Want More Virtual Cards for B2B Payments

Today in B2B payments, SMBs are still struggling to get their customers to pay on time, and B2B marketplace Solv expands into Kenya. Plus, companies want more help buying and managing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.

SMBs’ $28B Efforts to Encourage on-Time Payments Often Fall Flat

The average small and medium-sized business (SMB) receives 72 one-off or nonrecurring ad hoc payments — representing sales to buyers that SMBs work with up to a few times a year — for services rendered or products delivered each year and 30% of those payments come in late.

Many SMBs offer discounts to encourage their business partners to make payments on time, and they spend $28 billion annually on buyer discounts to do so, according to Fixing Small Business Payments, a PYMNTS and Ingo Money collaboration based on a survey of 1,573 U.S. small businesses.

But these SMB discounts don’t always have their intended effect, according to our research. More than one-third of ad hoc vendor payments that for which SMBs offer discounts come in late, and another third are paid on time rather than early.

How Digital Payment Adoption Drives Business Growth

Enterprise-grade digital payments solutions let organizations collect and process payments from connected devices and consumers or clients around the world, updating records in nearly real time and ensuring revenue data is easy to review, compare with enterprise resource planning (ERP) benchmarks and transform into actionable insights for the organization.

Digital payments technologies that integrate with an enterprise-grade treasury management system (TMS) or ERP platform with nearly real-time data access let financial institutions and businesses authenticate bank and account holder details, isolate errors and initiate corrections.

Companies Seek Help Buying, Managing SaaS Applications

Ryan Neu founded Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) buying platform Vendr three years ago to help companies save the time and money they were spending trying to figure out how to buy software. That allows procurement professionals, for example, to focus on strategic sourcing rather than dealing with 500 SaaS applications.

As Vendr grew rapidly, its customers started asking for help with spend visibility and spend tracking. The company announced Feb. 23 that it had acquired SaaS management platform Blissfully. Together, the firms will provide customers with a single solution to buy and manage SaaS applications.

Virtual Debit Cards Top List of FI B2B Payments Priorities

Although 66% of financial institutions (FIs) perceive the ability to offer clients digital payment solutions for addressing B2B payment frictions as “very” or “extremely” important, only 30% say their current solutions are “very” or “extremely” effective in addressing B2B payments frictions, according to The New User Experience, a PYMNTS and FIS collaboration that surveyed 311 financial institution executives.

The perceived effectiveness varies by client type, with the portions of FIs serving cross-border payments customers, large enterprises and middle-market companies that see digital payments as highly important to their customers being even larger.

To facilitate the consumerization of B2B payments, 64% of FIs are “very” or “extremely” willing to adopt new technologies. Another 24% are “somewhat” willing to do so.

B2B Marketplace Solv Expanding to Kenya

Financial services firm Standard Chartered is expanding its business-to-business (B2B) marketplace Solv, launched in India two years ago, into Kenya’s eCommerce space, according to a Business Daily report Thursday (March 3).

Standard Chartered Bank Kenya will likely be among the financial partners of the platform, which offers an online marketplace, support services and credit from multiple lenders for small businesses, the report says. Bangalore, India-based Solv is wholly owned by Standard Chartered and serves micro, small and medium-sized businesses.