This Week in B2B: Partnerships, Payments and Process Improvements

The future of B2B payments lies in automation, not administration.

Given the B2B sector’s legacy of complex workflows, intricate data requirements and entrenched manual processes, the opportunities for innovation are immense.

While modernizing something as entrenched into business workflows as a decades-old accounts payable or accounts receivable program may take some coaxing, companies that wait too long to integrate innovations into their operations could risk falling behind their competitors and miss out on potential efficiencies as next-generation capabilities continue to evolve.

Sticking to paper-based processes is costing businesses not just their time and money, but also increasingly preventing them from unlocking digitally driven 21st-century growth.

The top innovation pillars defining the B2B landscape this week were around the increasingly necessary benefits of workflow automation; the opportunity small business-focused solutions offer; why partnerships are building better B2B solutions; the ongoing digital transformation of traditional processes; and what’s being done to streamline cross-border payments.

By pooling resources, companies can accelerate the development and deployment of B2B innovations, allowing them to stay ahead of competitors. In an evolving digital landscape, these benefits position partnerships as a strategy for driving B2B innovation, as the marketplace showed this week.

As one example, Jaggaer and Bottomline partnered to provide companies with more payment options for B2B transactions. Bottomline’s Paymode business payment network and Premium ACH offering, virtual card and other payment modalities will be integrated into Jaggaer’s B2B payment solution, Jaggaer Pay, the companies said Thursday (Sept. 5).

Trustly and Newline by Fifth Third teamed up to facilitate money movement in the United States. The collaboration brings together Trustly’s open banking payments and Newline’s embedded payments platform, the companies said Thursday.

Elsewhere, last-mile delivery management firm Onfleet on Wednesday (Sept. 4) integrated with fleet insurance firm Fairmatic to deliver a solution aimed at companies with fleets of 10 or more vehicles, which gives fleet managers a comprehensive view of driver performance and can offer personalized safety recommendations.

Acquisitions were also announced this week.

Ncontracts acquired Venminder and announced Wednesday it will add Venminder’s unified platform for managing third-party risk to Ncontracts’ integrated compliance, risk and vendor management solutions for the financial services industry.

Also Wednesday, money mobility platform Ingo Payments acquired cloud-based banking platform Deposits Inc.

“This was literally a missing piece in our [platform] that powers the money in and money out [of an account],” Ingo Payments CEO Drew Edwards told PYMNTS in an interview.

Zil Money’s OnlineCheckWriter.com announced Tuesday (Sept. 3) that it now allows businesses to send checks funded by their credit card or wallet.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Getting Paid: Digital Payments for Improving Cash Flow and Customer Experience” found that 75% of organizations still use paper checks despite their high costs and inefficiencies.

That’s why PYMNTS unpacked Tuesday how, as digital transformation sweeps across industries, B2B payments are no longer merely about settling invoices; instead, they are increasingly about creating seamless, transparent and efficient experiences that reflect the brand’s values and commitment to its partners.

“If I had to boil it down to two words, it’s ‘competitive advantage,’” Aaron LeHew, director of invoice-to-cash at Esker, told PYMNTS Wednesday about embracing innovations around AR digitization and automation.

Achieving this competitive advantage is only getting easier as the integration-to-impact window shortens for firms looking to tap into new B2B payments innovations.

“One change can affect three or four different parts of your business,” Priority Head of Commercial Court Toomey told PYMNTS in an interview posted Thursday. “There’s no need for a large manufacturer to have to send out 10,000 rebate checks to every individual retailer that’s selling the product on a quarterly basis when there is a much more efficient way to do so, as long as they work with it within their supplier network or their buyer network in order to implement that change.”

Payment-as-a-Service provider UNIPaaS announced Tuesday that it launched a small business-focused invoice payments partnership with American Express.

On Thursday, PYMNTS unpacked how embracing purpose-built solutions that cater to the unique needs of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is top of mind for Main Street merchants and the FinTechs and payment innovators serving them.

Meanwhile, Ziina raised $22 million Tuesday to provide FinTech services for United Arab Emirates-based small businesses.

On Friday (Aug. 30), Brazilian FinTech Ume raised $15 million in a Series A funding round to expand its payment network and merchant services platform for SMBs on Pix.

Jack Henry and Moov teamed up Tuesday to help small businesses accept digital payments.

SMBs are a diverse group, varying in size, industry and geographical location, making their payment preferences equally diverse. Unlike large enterprises that can build custom payment systems or dedicate resources to advanced treasury management, SMBs operate with more limited budgets and infrastructure. As a result, their payment needs tend to revolve around affordability, simplicity, flexibility and reliability.

In a world where time is money, the ability to streamline contracting and payment processes is more than just a convenience — it’s a competitive advantage.

Marty Ringlein and Will Hubbard, co-founders of Agree.com, discussed the benefits of embedded solutions for mid-market companies in an interview with PYMNTS posted Thursday.

The marketplace is responding with other innovations as well. Revolut Business on Wednesday launched Revolut BillPay, a feature that automatically pulls bills in from the user’s accounting software or allows users to upload bills to their account.

Artificial intelligence is also transforming legacy workflows. Anthropic introduced a Claude Enterprise plan Wednesday that helps organizations collaborate with its AI assistant, Claude, using internal knowledge. The new plan includes an expanded 500K context window, more usage capacity, a native GitHub integration and enterprise-grade security features.

Meanwhile, one year after launching the first of its three business products, OpenAI said Thursday it now counts more than 1 million paying business users.

Seamless cross-border B2B payments remain one of the white whales of the connected economy.

With news Friday (Aug. 30) that Bridge raised an additional $40 million to continue building its stablecoin-based global payment scheme, executing international transactions quickly and conveniently is increasingly top of mind for companies looking to capture market share in foreign markets, as is ensuring those transactions are occurring compliantly and responsibly.

On Tuesday, PYMNTS unpacked why finding the right balance between these competing demands — convenience and compliance — is imperative for B2B buyers and suppliers.

As digital payments grow in popularity, the lack of cross-border interoperability has attracted attention, including that of infrastructure provider TerraPay President Ruben Salazar Genovez, who is leading a new effort to do something about it.

“We have huge respect for all the technology and the architecture and the user experience that our partners have been building in their domestic spaces,” Genovez told PYMNTS in an interview posted Thursday. “But the reality is that today, it’s very easy to travel with a piece of plastic, but it’s very difficult to travel with a piece of software. And so, we want to enable these wallets to be able to provide the same user experience and the same sort of payment capabilities when they travel abroad. And that is a gigantic task.”

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