B2B Payments Starving for Information

Excerpt from PYMNTS.com:

“Information is what is really key to B2B payments because it’s very unlike the consumer world, where you may swipe a card and transact at POS and everything about your payment happens right there. In the B2B world, it’s a very different situation, where goods and services are delivered and then an invoice and its 30, 45 or 90 days later when the payment’s made,” said Drew Hofler, director of solution marketing for SAP Cloud and Network Solutions, during a recent podcast.

“There’s this massive disconnect between the movement of the money and what that money is for. In the B2B world, often you will have maybe 100 invoices paid with a single payment. With the very limited information set that is available through electronic payment and ACH, you’re not able to get enough information. That’s what companies really need in order to reconcile, in order to know what to do, in order to have visibility and to forecast things like cash flow. They need that information. And frankly, the actual movement of money is such a given that it’s table stakes these days. It’s secondary. If banks cling to that as what’s core, I think that’s where they can become disintermediated by things like business networks that actually connect the information to the right people at the right time.”

See how Billtrust and Open Scan are addressing the information shortage problem in tomorrow’s webinar, or read the full article on PYMNTS.com.