How Outdated B2B Payments Are Quietly Killing Margins

Watch more: The Future of B2B Payments Is Embedded, Not Just Digital

B2B payments are the financial plumbing of the global economy. But beneath their surface of invoices, checks and ACH files lies a storm of complexity.

While consumer payments dazzled with tap-to-pay and instant apps, B2B stayed stubbornly analog. Today, as interchange fees rise, check fraud balloons and chief financial officers hunt for efficiency, the next wave of B2B transformation may not come from the rail itself, but from the experience that surrounds it.

“When you start talking about added cost in B2B payments, you open up a can of worms,” Murray Sharp, senior vice president of commercial B2B at Nuvei, told PYMNTS.

That’s because B2B payments aren’t just about transferring funds. They’re loaded with context, obligations and information.

“You’re not just a consumer checking out online,” Sharp said. “You have two systems trying to talk to each other.”

“There’s a difference in the hard cost associated with money movement and the soft costs associated with the tasks and the workflow that happen in and around the payment,” he added.

Those soft costs are where the real pain lives. Despite digital innovation, nearly 40% of B2B payments in the United States are still made by paper check. But it’s not just about resistance to change. The simplicity and universal acceptance of paper can still beat the disjointed user experience of many digital systems.

In B2B — where a transaction involves two businesses with distinct processes and platforms — that simplicity matters and is what has kept old systems alive.

“If push comes to shove, you’ll accept a check,” Sharp said. “It’s almost ubiquitous. Everybody has an address or a P.O. box. You don’t necessarily need tech to accept a check.”

The next decade, however, is about replacing paper simplicity with digital intelligence that works just as smoothly, he said.

The Cost of ‘Free’ Payments

For B2B buyers and suppliers, the cost of a payment isn’t just the fee but also the hours of manual reconciliation, the risk of fraud, the missed credit opportunities and the broken user experiences. Reconciliation can become a nightmare, especially in ACH credit push scenarios, where buyers initiate payments and remittance data is sent separately via email or portal.

“If it’s an ACH credit push … you’re probably hiring two or three people in the back office to reconcile those,” Sharp said. “Although ACH may be free in terms of hard costs, the soft costs can explode.”

Across Europe and the United Kingdom, bank-to-bank payments have gained more traction — helped by regulation, standardization and cultural norms. In the U.S., they remain underused, often treated as an afterthought.

“For most acquirers that serve B2B, bank-to-bank is treated as a secondary experience to card,” Sharp said. “Almost always it’s sort of a check-the-box or a throwaway.”

Nuvei sees things differently, he said. The firm is betting on embedded experiences, where payment flows are not just digital, but deeply integrated into a business’s core systems. This means connecting directly into the ERP — allowing invoices, payments and reconciliation to all flow in sync.

“When you combine [rails] with the software experience, it’s not really the same,” Sharp said. “We’re seeing customers gladly pay higher fees … for an embedded experience that delivers them the outcomes they’re looking for.”

“Most innovation in B2B is less about a rail and more about the experience in and around the rail,” he added, noting that this can include value-added services such as instant account validation to reduce errors and fraud, saved payment credentials so buyers don’t need to re-enter bank data, and a unified experience where all payment types — card, ACH — are tracked in one system.

“Companies want to do business with companies that are easy,” Sharp said.

But “easy” isn’t easy to build.

Why User Experience Is the Battlefield for B2B Payments

One of the most overlooked struggles in B2B is the tug-of-war between buyers and suppliers over who owns the process. Buyers want suppliers to key invoices into their portal. Suppliers want buyers to log in and pay through their own interface. The result can often be so-called portal fatigue.

“Both sets of automation tools for AP and AR are designed to make the counterparty do the manual work,” Sharp said. “It’s imperative that buyer-supplier relationships negotiate actual payment terms and rails when they’re negotiating the agreement itself.”

The fragmented experience isn’t just annoying — it’s inefficient and expensive. Payments get decoupled from invoices, reconciliation suffers and relationships strain.

“We’re very focused on delivering this modern experience that allows for customers to take a payment on any rail via any channel and have everything tie back to their system of record,” Sharp said. “The tooling is really there. What’s missing is the education — and the will to change.”

What would it take for B2B payments to truly modernize?

The real value lies in data, specifically the kind that enables automation, transparency and accuracy, Sharp said. In this vision, B2B payments become part of a richer data exchange, reducing manual work and unlocking smarter workflows.

“It’s less around the speed of settlement, but more around platform-to-platform connectivity,” Sharp said.

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