This posting appeared in Bankless Times and relates to a fintech in the B2B payments space by the name of PayStand, a 2013 startup out of Silicon Valley. The space has been getting a lot of play recently as the pace of change and available technology accelerates in the corporate payments arena. We have seen numerous partnerships and acquisitions in the past two years alone, many targeting the more legacy process approaches that have been more commonplace among SME and mid-market companies, especially in the U.S. and Canada.
PayStand, a B2B payment platform, today announced it has expanded its digital platform into Canada to support domestic B2B commercial payments and deepen its global payments infrastructure…..Canadian B2B payments over EFT account for greater than one third of all payments volume domestically, with card payments making up a large majority of the remainder. Those payments —whether made via bank-to-bank transfer, wire or check—are almost entirely manual, and often overburdened by high transactions fees and processing costs.
While the company’s DNA effectively represents more of a receivables orientation, if one understands the order-to cash cycle then it becomes more clear that it is a continuum, although because of legacy approaches, payables and receivables technology and processes typically remain segregated entities. So in effect PayStand as a payment platform has been most directly servicing the acceptance/supplier side of things. However, we did notice a more recent release of a payables solution directed at the buyer side as well.
In order to gain a bit more insight, Mercator followed up the release by chatting with PayStand’s CEO and founder, Jeremy Almond. He explained that the company vision is to effectively reduce and eventually eliminate the processing fees associated with paying and receiving the various forms of corporate payments. One does not accomplish such a transformation overnight, so as Mr. Almond explained, at a high level PayStand has a dual processing approach; one to support legacy requirements (which of course will not disappear for some time) and another to both capitalize and expand upon the reach of a unique blockchain network payments scheme. This is where the innovations can more easily get executed, including what the company describes as ‘Fund on File’, or a tokenized stored value resource allowing for consistent payment execution without the messy exchange of either company or PFI. The recent addition of an payables solution is a way to increase adoption and use of the newer platform approach, in support of the longer term ‘no-fee’ goal.
We will continue to track the fast-paced developments in corporate payments and keep you posted on the progress of innovative approaches as Industry 4.0 rolls along.
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commerical and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group