This Time Last Year: How 2025 Reshaped the AP/AR Innovation Cycle

The innovation curve in B2B payments used to be measured in decades. Not years.

But the key words here are “used to be.” As 2025 enters its final month, the distance between B2B payments innovation and enterprise adoption has collapsed, thanks in large part to artificial intelligence, APIs and shifting expectations around the payment experience.

The result is an accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) function that is hardly recognizable compared to just 12 months ago. Ongoing economic uncertainty has nudged organizations toward tighter cash discipline, vendors have accelerated their technology roadmaps, and chief financial officers are increasingly adopting tools that once felt optional.

The result is that AP/AR is no longer a linear series of tasks. It is a dynamic, data-rich system reshaping the modern enterprise’s cash conversion cycle and feeding into more actionable treasury management strategies. What once seemed experimental, including real-time treasury data, virtual card ubiquity, AI-assisted collections, predictive disbursements and more, has moved squarely into the mainstream.

Compared with this time last year, the difference is not just subtle. It is becoming structural.

Read also: How Embedded Finance, AI and Automation Are Redefining B2B Payment Networks

Forward-Looking Finance Leaders Are Rewiring the Time to Cash Cycle

The finance function is becoming a real-time system governed by data, algorithms and always-on workflows.

“The way in which you pay and get paid … is now in and of itself a really important strategic element in your business,” Boost Payment Solutions founder and CEO Dean M. Leavitt told PYMNTS in an interview last month.

“Payments are, in and of themselves, a strategic tool that CEOs should look at very carefully,” he added.

The marketplace is reflecting this reality. CoPlane, for example, announced Tuesday (Nov. 25) that it raised $14 million in a seed round to build AI-native software that integrates with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and automates core finance and operations processes.

Thanks to standardization across ERP systems, pre-built connectors, improved data models and cloud-native design, automating AP and AR has moved from a heavy IT project to a streamlined operational upgrade. CFOs now expect automation deployment timelines in weeks, not months.

“It used to be sort of a theme or a dream … and now a few years into it, we no longer need big teams of developers or big budgets to enable embedded finance into a platform,” Eric Frankovic, president of corporate payments at WEX, told PYMNTS last month.

“We call it the Amazon effect,” Frankovic added. “We want that same feeling in B2B payments. … We’ve had to sacrifice [user experience] for years, and now, thanks to embedded finance, I don’t think we have to anymore.”

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Time to Cash: A New Measure of Business Resilience,” introduced a new metric for agility, Time to Cash. The research found that the legacy era of closing the books and looking backward has given way to a new paradigm, a living cash flow system shaped by 12 operational levers spanning the four dimensions of receivables efficiency, payables control, operational workflows and financial visibility.

The report found that 77.9% of CFOs see improving the cash flow cycle as “very or extremely important” to their strategy in the year ahead, and 70% of firms surveyed already use at least one AI tool to manage cash flow.

See also: B2B Firms Are Betting on Time to Cash to Manage Uncertainty

The CFO’s New Copilot for Payables and Receivables

The arrival of generative and predictive AI capabilities has reconfigured AR and AP workflows, giving CFOs a new copilot that identifies patterns, surfaces insights and automates decision-making at a scale no human team could replicate.

Payables are executed more strategically thanks to virtual cards and intelligent payment optimization. Receivables are collected faster because AI targets the right customers with the right strategies. Treasury manages liquidity with precision because data arrives continuously rather than periodically. Automation has wiped out manual friction. Security improvements have reduced the drag of error correction and fraud prevention.

Perhaps the most important shift is becoming philosophical. CFOs increasingly view AP and AR not as administrative functions but as strategic levers for enterprise performance. Working capital is no longer a static measure updated monthly but a dynamic system tuned in real time. The teams managing these workflows have evolved from processors to operators to strategists.

“The reality is that the world is moving way faster than most companies can keep up pace with,” Wendy Tapia, head of product, receivables at FIS, told PYMNTS in September.

“When you have a unified cash view, now you have alignment with your procurement team, with the operations team, with treasury,” she added.

Compared with this time last year, finance leaders have expanded their ambition. They want systems that don’t just record transactions but shape outcomes. They want tools that don’t just automate tasks but anticipate them. They want visibility, not in hindsight, but in the moment decisions are made.

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