NEW WORLD ORDER: B2B PAYMENTS
Digital Embracing digital isn’t just an aspiration for B2B firms – it’s an urgent commercial imperative if you want to build lasting customer relationships, enable sales and access credit, say TreviPay’s Brandon Spear and Digital River’s Adam Coyle
transaction completion. That’s where people like Digital River and TreviPay offer great solutions that people can leverage for that experience.”
The devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped our lives forever. Measures by governments to try to contain its terrible toll, including lockdowns, have forced behavioural changes on populations to an unprecedented degree. And that meant legions of businesses and consumers suddenly had to pivot to doing things digitally. The evolution towards e-commerce, steered mainly by a younger generation of tech-savvy consumers, suddenly turned into a revolution, affecting everyone, of every age. And it’s a transformation from which there will be no return as customer demands and expectations have permanently changed, both for business-to-customer (B2C) transactions and, increasingly, for business-to-business (B2B) ones, too. Against this backdrop, two companies that are working together to further shake up the B2B payments space are digital payments provider TreviPay, which provides credit lines for businesses akin to buy now, pay later (BNPL) terms, and Digital River, an e-commerce enabler that provides a merchant of record solution covering payments, taxes, compliance, fraud mitigation and logistics. ffnews.com
Brandon Spear, the CEO of TreviPay, which deals with $6billion of transactions across 27 countries each year, is in no doubt that the pandemic super-charged B2B payments digitisation. “It’s been a macro trend for a while but there’s been a huge acceleration of this in the last two years, principally driven by the pandemic,” says Spear. “From our point of view, it’s really pulled forward, or compressed, three to five years’ worth of digital transformation into probably the last 18 months.” Adam Coyle, CEO of Digital River, is also convinced that other changes that were borne out of necessity, like sales pitches using digital conference calls rather than face-to-face meetings, are here to stay. “I think the days of us getting on airplanes and flying hours to a customer’s site to have a one-hour meeting are gone,” he says. “The buyers want to have an experience that is very much like the consumer experience that they’ve become accustomed to in their personal lives. “That’s where we’re seeing this huge transformation in B2B, both in terms of online go-to-market and online
THE WAY TO GO Given the global pace of change, Spear warns firms that have yet to digitise could quickly find themselves becoming uncompetitive. Indeed, research published in 2021 by PYMNTS and Worldpay in their Global B2B Payments Playbook, has shown that digitising B2B payments data and managing it via enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, can improve collections, days sales outstanding (DSO) and operations. The study showed that just under half of firms that have adopted automated accounts receivable (AR) processes had lower overall delinquency rates; 62 per cent reported reduced DSO; and 72 per cent made savings on their operational costs. In addition, 87 per cent of those that had incorporated automated AR technology said it had produced faster processing speeds. Another 79 per cent said it had improved team efficiency, while 75 per cent thought it had provided a better experience for their customers. While it’s not too late for businesses to make the change, Spear says they should hurry up. Issue 11 | ThePaytechMagazine
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