Payments Platform Limepay Unveils BNPL Tool

Australian payments platform Limepay has launched STACK, a solution the company said will offer businesses new ways to pay, including buy now, pay later (BNPL).

As the website IT Brief Australia reported Tuesday (April 19), STACK is an all-in-one payments platform that gives business-to-business (B2B) businesses and their customers an easier way of making, receiving and processing payments.

According to Limepay, STACK allows merchants to get paid upfront, while businesses can use it to sell from anywhere — online, in person, through their website or over the phone — while keeping customers within their ecosystem.

STACK supports a number of payment methods, including Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Apple Pay and Google Pay, along with eCommerce plug-ins for Magento 1 and 2, WooCommerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Brands can also offer white-labeled BNPL solutions to their customers, along with several flexible payment options.

Willie Pang, the company’s CEO, said many B2B companies still rely on paper to make payments at a time when business-to-consumer (B2C) companies have embraced multiple payment methods.

That’s in keeping with PYMNTS’ research, which shows some experts estimating that 40% of U.S. B2B payments are still made using checks, with 81% of businesses still paying other companies via paper checks, making it the most common method of B2B payments.

Read more: B2B Payments: 40% Are Made With Paper Checks

Many companies’ traditional accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) processes are designed to accommodate all aspects of paper check payments, making it difficult for some to shift entirely to digital B2B payments.

It can be especially tough for smaller firms to budget the money and digitize their B2B payment processes if their suppliers aren’t yet sold on the merits of electronic payment methods. In addition, businesses still see paper checks as a reliable B2B payment method.

“Digital payment is slow in the B2B space,” Pang said. “There have been attempts in the past with varied and inconsistent results, but it was hard to find one solution.”

He added that the perceived cost of a transition is a key reason for the lag, but Limepay said things have begun to change, in part due to the COVID pandemic. The company said the number of B2B companies offering omnichannel sales has increased over the past two years as the pandemic has altered the nature of commerce.