Supply Chain Stress Forces Buyers and Suppliers to Rethink Payment Terms

B2B payments typically arrive with invoice and remittance data, not fanfare.

These fundamental value transfers are largely invisible to anyone outside finance departments, embedded inside enterprise software, compliance frameworks and chief financial officer workflows.

That invisibility is part of why change in B2B payments often goes unnoticed.

However, as Daniel Artin, head of strategic partnerships at Boost Payment Solutions, told PYMNTS, what’s changing now is the recognition that B2B payment infrastructure itself can be a lever for mutual benefit. Richer remittance data may help reduce reconciliation costs, for example, while predictable, faster settlement can improve supplier liquidity.

“You’re starting to see a lot more sophistication when it comes to that dialogue between buyers and suppliers,” Artin said, adding that faster payment terms, better data and fairer economics are aligning interests in ways that were rare even a few years ago.

This reframing matters because B2B payments have historically been resistant to win-win narratives. In earlier eras, large buyers were likely to be found strong-arming suppliers into accepting certain payment methods, extracting value unilaterally.

B2B payments’ evolution is being driven as much by pressure as by opportunity. Supply chain volatility, higher interest rates and greater scrutiny on working capital have forced companies on both sides of the transaction to rethink how value is shared, as well as how friction can be removed without simply shifting costs downstream.

“Unlike the past, where decisions used to be siloed between one third-party vendor for one function and another vendor for another function, we’re starting to see a lot of companies make decisions within their ERP systems, within their accounting software systems, or their vertical SaaS platforms,” Artin said.

B2B payments, in this emerging sense, are no longer an endpoint but a native feature of enterprise operations.

Why 2026 Marks a Turning Point for B2B Payments

For much of the past decade, B2B payments innovation followed a somewhat fragmented logic. Companies assembled stacks of specialized vendors, each solving the discrete problems of invoicing here, reconciliation there and payments somewhere else. That modular approach delivered incremental gains, but it also created friction, redundancy and blind spots across accounts payable and accounts receivable.

“One of the things we saw that doesn’t work is companies with a linear approach to building out the best order-to-cash solution or the best procure-to-pay solution without taking into consideration how the opposite end receives and interacts with that platform,” Artin said.

“These CFOs, these receivables organizations, they’re getting a kaleidoscope of payment receivables,” he added. “Some are getting checks, some are getting payments faxed to them, some customers phone in and give credit card information over the phone, some are going through a web portal. It’s honestly bewildering how folks even handle it.”

The stresses of this legacy balancing act are increasingly reshaping how digital B2B payments like virtual cards are perceived inside enterprises.

“Those companies that do it right are starting to see benefits by using digital payments as a strategic tool,” Artin said.

Several macro trends are accelerating the situation, including the fact that embedded payments are becoming table stakes rather than a differentiator. Artificial intelligence, too, is moving beyond reconciliation and into prediction, helping finance teams model cash flow and anticipate risk.

Globalization is no longer reserved for multinationals; even mid-market companies now operate across borders and expect their B2B payments to keep pace, Artin said.

In light of these advancements, the more durable B2B payment solutions are interoperable by design, he said.

Interoperability as the Next Competitive Battleground

The experience of one of Boost’s own customers, a firm with multiple affiliates, illustrates what interoperability can unlock. The company struggled with misrouted funds, excessive paper checks and low automation rates, but by facilitating a dialogue between AP and AR platforms and addressing data gaps that prevented reconciliation, Boost helped orchestrate a shared solution that drove automation from below 50% to over 97%.

“A strategic partnership means those companies that help co-create payment solutions that are embedded or exist in existing workflows for businesses,” Artin said, adding that the gains at the firm were not driven by new software alone, but by sustained collaboration across stakeholders willing to expose friction points and solve them together.

A strategic partner in this sense should not be compared to another vendor plugged into a tech stack but viewed as a collaborator that designs alongside ERP systems, accounting platforms and vertical SaaS tools, he said.

That philosophy also underpins Boost’s newer Payments-as-a-Service (PaaS) initiative, which offers Boost’s proprietary multi-patented straight-through-processing technology as a utility that other acquirers can white-label or resell. The launch is particularly relevant as new card network standards go live, introducing rich data requirements for large-ticket transactions. Because Boost had already invested in compliance and certification, it was able to not only support its own merchants but also extend that capability to other acquirers.

The ability of strategic partnerships to enable shared incentives, regulatory readiness and design systems that acknowledge the messy realities of how businesses actually get paid will be the defining lesson in 2026, Artin said.

“We’re now seeing people being able to use the tool more strategically in win-win scenarios,” he said, adding that with virtual cards, buyers can get a 30-day float while vendors can receive faster payment, unlocking better terms for both sides.

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