In the past 4 years there has been roughly $80 billion of private investment (VC and corporate) in startup fintech ventures, not to mention the many billions of ongoing expenditures by mature fintechs and financial institutions on modernizing payments infrastructure and solutions. Much of this investment has made its way to the path of fastest return, meaning the consumer-related market, and a lot of that has been mobile. This piece summarizes some of the changing tides as technology around the more complex corporate payments space is starting to catch up.
B2B payments are fundamentally different than consumer payments, for three main reasons. First, there is the sheer volume of payments businesses make…..Second, in order to pay your supplier electronically, you need to know what types of payments they accept, where to send them, what format to send them in, who the remittance contact is and, if they prefer automated clearing house or ACH payments, what their bank account number and routing number are……The third and final thing is the dynamic nature of the data. You have this huge volume of sensitive data that has to be collected, and then it is always changing.
The article goes on to summarize a few of the important trends now impacting the corporate payments space. Mercator covers all of the identified trends in detail with numerous research reports in just the past 12 months covering the landscape changes. These include faster payments, end-to-end automation, blockchain, cross-border and the potential for fintechs to now apply to the OCC for charters to become national banks, all of which as mentioned in this brief summary.
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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