Today in B2B: Trucking Industry Moving Into the Digital Age; Credit Unions Aren’t Yet One-Stop Shops for Business Customers

Today in B2B payments, almost half of credit union members get business lines of credit elsewhere, and it’s time for restaurants to update their back-of-the-house technology. Plus, IndiaMART invests $11.4M in accounting software monitoring app Livekeeping, and trucking companies are moving toward more digital, driver-friendly payment methods.

B2B Marketplace IndiaMART Invests $11M in Livekeeping

IndiaMART, India’s largest B2B marketplace, has invested $11.4 million in Livekeeping, an app that lets businesses keep tabs on their accounting software.

The deal will also see IndiaMART acquire a 51.09% stake in Livekeeping, whose corporate name is Finlite Technologies Private Limited.

This is the second such investment from IndiaMART in the last month. In February, the company announced plans to invest $1.8 million in cloud-based accounting software platform Realbooks, a move that gave IndiaMART a 26% stake in the firm.

48% of Credit Union Members Get Business Lines of Credit From Other Financial Institutions

The share of credit union members seeking business lines of credit through other financial institutions (FIs) has risen 16% over 2020 levels, with 48% of members who use financial products from other FIs now citing business lines of credit as one of those products. That’s up from 42% in 2020, according to the Credit Union Innovation Playbook, a PYMNTS and PSCU collaboration.

Business lines of credit are among the most profitable financial products for CUs, meaning that portfolio leakage in this key area could strike a harsh blow to CUs’ profitability. Forty-five percent of members said that all things being equal, they would prefer to get all their financial products from the same FI.

Two-thirds of members who currently have business lines of credit with FIs other than their primary CUs said they would be willing to drop those business credit lines if their CUs could offer more innovative alternatives.

Planning for Long Haul, Trucking Companies Embrace Driver-Friendly Payments

Relay Payments, a provider of digital payment solutions for the transportation, logistics and supply chain industries, introduced a technology-enabled all-in-one fleet expense card and driver mobile app called RelayGo earlier this month.

RelayGo is a corporate charge card for drivers. Based on the size of their fleet, companies can apply for different ranges of funding with different payment terms as well. It also includes proprietary expense management technology for carriers — along with an app that helps drivers find parking, repair shops and other services. Most of the company’s customers operate the Class 8 trucks commonly known as 18-wheelers and run fleets that range in size from one truck to 20,000.

When it started the project, Relay Payments found that most of these carriers were still making payments with fleet checks or cash. Relay Payments has found that about half of its new business comes from referrals from other trucking companies that have already switched to its products.

Restaurants Jumped On Curbside Pickup, Now They Need to Fix Outdated Back-of-the-House Tech

Restaurants’ front-of-house operations have barreled into the future with increasingly frictionless consumer-facing digital technologies, but the back of house is still stuck in the past, with restaurant operators are often left to deal with checks, postage stamps and stacks of physical documents.

Notch, a business-to-business (B2B) wholesale food and beverage marketplace for restaurants and distributors, announced earlier this month the launch of a new payment platform, notchPay, with an eye toward increasing payment speed and efficiency.

These B2B payments play a central role in restaurant operations and digitizing them can improve many other restaurant processes, such as digital invoicing removing friction from the inventory management process, automatically updating systems with information about transactions and simplifying bookkeeping by integrating with systems including Quickbooks.