Over the past six months, the COVID-19 pandemic has heavily influenced the way businesses interact with each other.
We have seen online solutions to physical problems skyrocket across sectors.
Technology-driven and integrated payment systems are an integral part of this macro digital revolution.In the consumer world digital payment options, championed by consumer electronic leaders like Samsung, Apple and Google, have steadily gained traction since the inception of contactless technology in late 2014.When purchasing coffee at a local cafe, it is not uncommon for a customer to wave their smartphone or wearable across a point-of-sale terminal without thinking twice about the entire experience — funds flow uninterrupted in a matter of seconds between the customer and the business.
Even peer-to-peer network models have surged in popularity since Venmo’s initial release in 2011.Fintech NewsHowever, the mainstream adoption of this connected interaction between buyers and sellers has been strikingly absent from the business-to-business (B2B) money transfer ecosystem.
Until recently, digital payments have long been a supporting character to more familiar, traditional and ordinary methods — namely domestic ACH in the United States and international bank wire.The pandemic didn’t necessarily spur massive innovation and change in the context of business payments, but rather revealed and accelerated the popularity of digital solutions that savvy, early-adopters have been using to their advantage for the past 10 years.
Accounting applications like Intuit’s Quickbooks, Oracle’s NetSuite and Xero layered with workflow automation tools like Zapier make sharing data and information — like invoices, contracts and purpose of payment details — an easy task.This harmony between business applications simplifies payment reconciliation for senders and receivers.In contrast, fragmented processes see payment and accounting systems as separate domains that require manual integration by both parties on either end of the transaction.