For B2B Payments, Speed Is the New Strategy

When weighing the adoption of digital B2B payments, enterprise CFOs once had to squint out across the innovation horizon. No longer. Payment advances such as digitization, automation, commercial cards, real-time payments and more are now maturing, becoming table stakes.

In their wake, a more prosaic concern is beginning to dominate executive thinking: the pace at which their accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) systems can adapt to the fast-changing commercial reality.

“I think my word of the year is velocity. Velocity is expected now on many fronts. It’s primarily how fast can we provide value to our customers, to our partners,” Dean M. Leavitt, founder and CEO of Boost Payment Solutions, told PYMNTS during a conversation for the “What’s Next in Payments” series February edition, “Word of the Year.”

In corporate payments, where adoption cycles have historically stretched across quarters or years, the pressure now is to compress decision-making, implementation and supplier enablement into far shorter timeframes.

“The office of the CFO is broadening its mandate,” Leavitt said, adding that while decisions about how companies pay and are paid “were traditionally a secondary issue for most CFOs,” that legacy hierarchy is now changing as finance leaders come to recognize the working-capital implications of strategic B2B payment design.

How Digital B2B Payments Are Driving the CFO’s Expanding Mandate

The emerging emphasis on B2B payments velocity does not herald a dramatic technological break from the inertia of legacy processes, but rather the ongoing maturation of digital payments into an infrastructure business. For much of the 2010s, the industry’s central challenge was persuading businesses to abandon manual processes. Electronic invoicing, virtual cards and automated reconciliation were themselves the innovations.

Today, those tools are widely available, and differentiation lies in execution rather than invention. If there is a new competitive standard emerging in B2B payments, it is responsiveness to client demand rather than technological novelty.

“It’s not just velocity for velocity’s sake,” Leavitt said. “The first thing our customers and partners notice is the speed at which we can deliver those solutions, and the response time to what the market’s telling us.”

That responsiveness can frequently take the form of iterative and operational work, not necessarily the rip-the-rug transformative disruption often conveyed by conventional FinTech approaches.

“Velocity always has to be balanced with, are you delivering a product, solution, or service that is reliable, scalable and secure,” Leavitt said, noting that this can take incremental forms such as modifying workflows, accommodating supplier preferences or diagnosing inefficiencies observed in adjacent systems.

But those three attributes, he argued, have remained unchanged despite the industry’s technological evolution. In the face of today’s push for speed and innovation, stability, once assumed, has become a differentiator again.

“Reliability, scalability and security are what the market wants and needs,” Leavitt said. “And they need to be delivered with velocity.”

Growth Defined by Durability and Resilience

One persistent obstacle to broader use of digital B2B payment solutions, such as commercial cards, has been resistance among large suppliers, many of whom regard card acceptance as costly or administratively burdensome. Boost has sought to address that resistance by altering the negotiation dynamic from one of persuasion to customization.

By aligning payment mechanisms with supplier preferences, adoption becomes a matter of operational fit rather than ideological conversion to digitization.

“You tell us the scenarios under which you would consider card acceptance, and we’ll build a world around that,” Leavitt said.

He described success for Boost less in terms of market share than in the quality of growth. After all, in enterprise payments, customer retention behaves differently than in consumer markets. Relationships tend to migrate alongside procurement decisions rather than terminate outright. When a corporate buyer changes suppliers, the payments infrastructure must adjust accordingly, and growth may depend on how efficiently networks can be reconfigured as commercial relationships evolve.

“Our customers typically don’t leave us,” Leavitt said. Instead, the company is asked to extend its services to new counterparties, reinforcing the need for rapid onboarding capabilities.

International payments also represent another domain where responsiveness is reshaping expectations. Boost currently processes transactions to suppliers in more than 55 countries and territories and has infrastructure capable of reaching over 180 nations.

Rather than replacing existing systems, Boost’s card-to-account platform, which was purpose-built for the enterprise and which it brands as Boost 100XB, allows companies to pay 100% of their suppliers globally with a commercial card product even when their issuing banks lack international issuance capabilities.

As finance functions grow more sophisticated and global commerce becomes more interconnected, expectations of adaptability across B2B commerce will continue to rise, Leavitt said. That direction of travel, he added, is unlikely to reverse.