The Back Office Is Holding Real-Time Payments Hostage

B2B payments have gone real-time, and that’s made transaction speed table stakes for both buyers and suppliers. But all the speed in the world means nothing if the workflows and data context surrounding B2B payments can’t then integrate seamlessly into core enterprise decision-making systems.

The latest PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Ready and Willing: B2B Payments Are Headed for Real-Time Rails. Here’s How They’re Getting There,” a collaboration with The Clearing House, reveals the contours of a consequential fight now happening deep inside the enterprise stack. The report data suggests the single biggest obstacle to broader real-time B2B payment adoption is not one of fraud concerns, transaction costs or supplier resistance. It is integration.

Real-time payments lose their speed, and much of their contextual value, when they’re forced to fit the square-peg-round-hole realities of legacy treasury management systems, enterprise resource planning software and accounts payable workflows.

The research found that 29% of businesses with more than $25 million in annual revenue identified ERP integration as the single most important improvement for future payment performance. Businesses surveyed consistently identified ERP interoperability as the top driver of adoption, the top requested improvement and one of the primary reasons they hesitate to adopt new payment rails at all.

After all, it is ERP integration that determines whether real-time payments become a winning operational reality or remain a compelling but underused feature. The companies that deliver that capability will likely define the next decade of B2B financial infrastructure.

Why the ‘ERP Wars’ Are Just Beginning

Real-time payments already outperform traditional methods on nearly every operational metric businesses care about. According to the PYMNTS intelligence data, firms using instant payment methods rated them better across all 20 measured business capabilities, including cash flow management, supplier relationships, reconciliation efficiency and revenue recognition.

Eighty-five percent of businesses said instant methods improved vendors’ access to funds. Seventy-nine percent reported stronger cash flow management. More than three-quarters cited better reconciliation and operational agility. That is why the real-time payment race in B2B increasingly looks less like a payments story and more like an enterprise software story. The rails matter, but the orchestration layer matters more.

The history of enterprise technology suggests that once interoperability reaches maturity, adoption accelerates nonlinearly because switching costs fall while competitive pressure rises. Businesses that continue relying on slower, fragmented payment processes begin sacrificing liquidity visibility, reconciliation efficiency and supplier responsiveness against competitors operating in real time.

Read the report: Ready and Willing: B2B Payments Are Headed for Real-Time Rails. Here’s How They’re Getting There

Yet despite those advantages, real-time rails still account for only a small fraction of overall B2B payment volume. Credit cards, checks and ACH continue to dominate enterprise finance operations. That contradiction reveals an important truth about enterprise software markets: superior technology rarely wins on functionality alone. It wins when it fits naturally into existing systems.

For finance departments, payments are not standalone events. They are embedded operational processes tied to procurement systems, invoicing logic, reconciliation workflows, liquidity forecasting and treasury controls. A payment rail that requires manual intervention, custom integrations or workflow redesign introduces friction that can outweigh the benefits of speed itself.

In other words, the bottleneck is no longer payment capability. It is workflow compatibility. The future competitive battleground is therefore less about who processes the payment fastest and more about who becomes the default operating environment for enterprise liquidity.

The divergence between RTP adoption and FedNow adoption underscores this point.

Although both networks offer real-time settlement, businesses using RTP report stronger gains in operational fit, risk management and cost transparency. RTP adoption also rises sharply among larger enterprises, where treasury complexity is greatest. Among businesses with at least $25 million in annual revenue, RTP adoption reached 17%, compared with just 3% among smaller firms.

The most valuable companies in the next generation of B2B payments may therefore be the ones that make real-time payments operationally invisible. Enterprises do not want another payment portal. They want instant settlement embedded directly into procurement systems, treasury dashboards, ERP workflows and automated reconciliation engines.