How B2B Payments Data Turns Customer Retention Into a Growth Strategy

Sales cycles are longer. Budgets are tighter. Customer churn is costlier than ever.

These are just three themes that are defining 2025’s midway point for B2B firms.

Add to that on-again, off-again tariffs and an uncertain geopolitical landscape, and contemporary operational realities have left many B2B companies re-evaluating how they grow. Traditional growth plays, such as global expansion or capital investments, are now laced with risk.

This re-evaluation is poised to potentially kickstart a digital transformation across B2B. At the center of it all is the role of B2B payments data in customer retention.

Facing rising input costs, supply chain friction and potential trade retaliation from key markets like China and the European Union, many firms are shifting focus to their existing customers. In an unpredictable trade environment, one of the few things a company can control is the strength of its relationships with existing clients.

Once treated purely as a back-office necessity, payment behavior is now being recognized as an early warning signal for churn, a goldmine for segmentation and a strategic input for customer success and growth planning.

Read also: 3 Reasons B2B Payments Data Is So Valuable

In a market where customer acquisition costs (CAC) have risen sharply, acquiring a new customer can cost more than retaining an existing one. Despite this, many companies still allocate the lion’s share of their growth budgets toward paid acquisition channels, not post-sale engagement.

This imbalance can often be fueled by legacy organizational structures. For example, marketing can frequently own acquisition, while product owns usage, and customer success owns churn. Ultimately, this leaves few teams owning the end-to-end customer lifecycle. That’s where data-driven retention can come in, but only if B2B payment functions like accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) are speaking the same language, ideally with minimal manual intervention.

“At any time, when you have paper, you introduce manual processes,” Duncan Lodge, global head of supply chain finance and EMEA head of trade at Bank of America, told PYMNTS in September. “That means someone has to extract information, process it and ensure its accuracy — introducing delays, inefficiencies and the potential for error.”

Unlike paid growth, retention improvements can effectively compound over time. Every percentage point increase in retention can improve customer lifetime value, expand margin and reduce pressure on CAC payback. They also help support product-led growth, as satisfied, retained users are more likely than client prospects to upgrade, refer others and expand organically.

This strategy can be especially vital when tariff-driven cost increases must be passed along to customers. Companies with strong customer success operations may be better equipped to communicate the rationale behind price changes, provide alternative options (such as adjusted service tiers or payment terms), and retain the relationship through transparency and partnership.

See also: From PDFs to APIs: Enterprise Modernization Ditches Clunky Human Hand-Offs

Savvy B2B firms are realizing that retention is not a reactive function. It’s a proactive, cross-functional discipline that involves sales, customer service, product and finance teams working in unison.

Take, for example, a hypothetical failed B2B relationship. A typical post-mortem may reveal delayed payments, missed renewals and no proactive outreach. Product usage may have remained steady, but behind the scenes budgets were tightening, and procurement teams had deprioritized renewal conversations.

What happened in this scenario? No one was watching the payment trail.

Today’s machine learning models built on historical data can show that certain payment behaviors correlate strongly with churn, particularly changes in frequency, method or timing. By feeding this into predictive churn models, companies can catch signals that traditional systems miss.

“I think anybody who says we’re all doing a good job with the data we’re generating doesn’t understand the magnitude of the terabytes of data that we’re generating on a daily basis,” Wally Mlynarski, former head of merchant solutions and receivables at Bank of America, told PYMNTS in May 2024.

“Whenever there’s a transfer of payment or money, there’s an opportunity to enhance [the process],” he added.

In a capital-constrained environment, growth leaders must ask themselves if they are solving a retention problem with an acquisition budget. Often, the fastest path to growth may not be finding new users. It could be keeping the ones already there.

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