Fifty-nine percent of chief financial officers (CFOs) say digitizing payments is key to maintaining healthy balance sheets — a lesson some learned the hard way during the pandemic. In the Business Payments Digitization Report, PYMNTS interviewed 400 CFOs across five industries to learn how payments digitization is helping them unlock efficiencies, enhance working capital and prepare their businesses for long-term growth.
Businesses of all sizes and sectors found themselves in dire financial straits after March 2020, putting unprecedented pressure on the chief financial officers (CFOs) responsible for helping them weather the pandemic. Instead of crumbling under pressure, however, many CFOs took it as an opportunity to accelerate their efforts to digitize their payments flows. Seventy-one percent of them have increased their businesses’ usage of digital payments since March 2020, in fact, while 87 percent are using fewer manual payment methods like checks and cash.
This is just one of the findings uncovered in Business Payments Digitization: A Path To A Better Balance Sheet, a PYMNTS and Corcentric collaboration. We surveyed CFOs from organizations generating between $400 million and $2 billion in annual revenues about whether their firms have accelerated usage of digital payments since March 2020 to learn more about how balance sheet health figures into their broader, long-term growth strategies.
Other key findings from our research include:
– Fifty-nine percent of CFOs believe payments digitization is key to maintaining a healthy balance sheet. Thirty-six percent of CFOs accelerated their payments digitization efforts specifically because they believed doing so would improve their balance sheet health. These findings underscore how central CFOs believe digital innovation can be in their payment optimization strategies.
– Eighty-four percent of CFOs say payments digitization has improved working capital. This is just one of an average of 4.1 ways CFOs say their businesses have benefited from payment digitization. Other key benefits firms have enjoyed from digitizing their payment processes include enhanced efficiency, reduced costs and stronger data security.
– Finance and insurance firms and healthcare firms are the most balance sheet-focused of all regarding payment digitization. Firms in these industries believe more strongly than the rest in the importance of payment digitization, at 71 percent and 64 percent, respectively. They are also more likely to say that payment digitization benefits their broader payment operations.
It is clear that digital payment innovation will be at the top of CFOs’ agendas going forward. Business Payments Digitization: A Path To A Better Balance Sheet provides an overview of the factors influencing CFOs’ drive to digitize and the benefits enjoyed by those that have made digitization acceleration a central focus.
To learn more about how CFOs believe payments digitization can enhance their financial performance, download the report.