Stop Managing B2B Payments Like It’s 2010
By Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand, CEO of the Digital Banking Report, and host of the Banking Transformed podcast
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In nearly every conversation I have with financial institution leadership, the stated priority is growth. New revenue. Stronger client relationships. A business that looks meaningfully different in five years than it does today. In practice, most of the budget and internal attention goes toward efficiency. Reducing costs. Automating what already exists. That is necessary work. It is not a growth strategy.
Key insight: B2B acceptance is a genuine growth opportunity, one that builds new revenue streams and deepens existing client relationships at the same time. It sits adjacent to the consumer business most institutions have already optimized, and it represents an $80 trillion commercial payments market that remains largely underpenetrated.
In commercial payments, new revenue and deeper relationships come from the same move.
The Inflection Point for B2B Payments
I spent most of my career thinking about banking from the consumer side. That was where the industry focused most of its energy and capital for the better part of the last two decades, and the consumer transformation that followed was real. The institutions that moved early built advantages their competitors spent years trying to close.
What is happening in B2B payments right now follows the same pattern, with one important difference. In the mobile era, the pressure was internal, a strategic bet made ahead of the curve. In B2B payments, the pressure is already external.
What this means: Commercial clients are actively adjusting how they choose and retain suppliers based on payment experience, and that shift is underway whether or not the institutions serving them are prepared for it.
The Scale of the B2B Problem
The past decade of payments innovation focused almost entirely on the consumer experience, and by most measures the industry delivered. Mobile access improved, transaction speeds increased, and digital engagement became table stakes.
Reality check: Business payments did not receive the same attention, and the gap is now measurable in operational costs and lost revenue. Paper checks remain common. Reconciliation is largely manual, and for organizations managing multiple supplier relationships, that translates into real time and real money absorbed by process rather than growth. According to Mastercard research, many suppliers are managing five or more payment types simultaneously, with a significant share reporting that late payments have become routine because buyers cannot pay the way they prefer.
That is not a technology limitation. It is an infrastructure gap that has been deprioritized for too long.
The Buyer Isn’t Waiting
The demand side of this conversation has already moved further than most acquirers realize. Mastercard research shows that more than half of buyers say they will switch suppliers if virtual card acceptance is not available, which means payment capability has crossed from preference into selection criteria. Among companies already using virtual cards, nearly all report faster transactions and significantly lower fraud exposure.
Two-thirds of suppliers acknowledge they are not meeting buyer expectations around payment experience, and one in three are receiving late payments because they do not offer the method their customer prefers. Internal processes built around older models are colliding with buyer expectations that have already moved. It is showing up in contract renewals and lost revenue right now.
What this means: When payment experience becomes part of how buyers choose and keep suppliers, the institutions enabling that experience become part of the competitive equation. Acquirers not positioned to support virtual card acceptance at scale are not neutral observers in that dynamic. They are a constraint their clients are actively working around. Think about what that means for the commercial relationships you have spent years building. The payment infrastructure question is no longer back-office. It is a front-line retention issue.
The Structural Mismatch in B2B
According to Mastercard research, the average B2B payment is approximately $40,000. The average acquirer underwrites a supplier at a ceiling closer to $10,000. That is not a rounding error. That is a decision your institution has been making by default, and it is costing you transaction volume inside relationships you already own.
Set against an $80 trillion commercial payments market, that gap represents something more significant than missed volume. It represents a growth opportunity sitting inside portfolios that already exist, at institutions that have spent years optimizing the consumer side of the ledger. The next layer of revenue is not about new customers. It is about capturing the transaction flows your current clients are already running through other channels.
Overcoming the Complexity Objection
Every time I raise B2B acceptance in a room of payments executives, the same objection surfaces: complexity. Too resource-intensive to implement. Too disruptive to existing infrastructure. Too difficult to prioritize when the consumer roadmap is already crowded. The complexity is real. It is also not as insurmountable as it looks from the outside.
Mastercard research on institutions that have already moved tells a consistent story. The areas that generate the most hesitation before adoption, security exposure and operational burden, are the same areas where adopters report the most meaningful improvement. The fears are real, but the data suggests they are being applied to a problem that a modular, targeted approach substantially reduces. You do not need to rebuild everything to capture meaningful value. Most institutions making progress started with a specific vertical or supplier segment where client demand was already visible, proved the model, and expanded from there.
Reality check: What holds most organizations back is not the underlying technology. It is how the decision is framed internally. Treat B2B acceptance as a future-state capability and it stays there. Frame it as a revenue opportunity inside existing client relationships with visible buyer demand and it gets resourced. At this point in the market, that is the difference between leading and catching up.
The Monday Morning Test
Here is the test I apply at the end of every conversation about innovation readiness, and I will apply it here. When you walked out of your last strategy session, was B2B acceptance on the agenda as a funded growth initiative, or was it parked in the future-state section of the roadmap? If it was the latter, your buyer base is not waiting for you to revisit it. They are making supplier decisions and payment infrastructure choices right now, and the institutions ready to support those decisions are building the kind of client stickiness that is difficult to dislodge later.
The institutions that led mobile banking a decade ago were not operating with perfect information. They read where client behavior was heading, committed resources before the competitive pressure forced their hand, and built an advantage that compounded. B2B payments is at that same point, except the pressure is already external and the timeline is tighter. Commercial clients are adjusting how they pay and who they pay based on payment experience today, not in three years.
Bottom line: B2B acceptance belongs on your roadmap. The real question is whether your institution leads that decision or spends the next several years trying to close a gap your most forward-looking competitors are opening right now.
Every institution I visit says it wants to grow beyond yesterday’s bank. B2B acceptance is one of the clearest paths to doing exactly that, capturing transaction flows that currently bypass your institution and building relationships your competitors have not yet made a priority. The window is open. What your institution does with it is the only question that matters right now.
