It’s Contract Renewal Season, Are Your B2B Payment Strategies Ready?

As the days tick toward 2026, the corridors of procurement and finance departments hum with a familiar rhythm. It’s the last quarter of the year. It’s contract renewal season.

For B2B firms, this annual exercise has always been a dance of terms, pricing and performance. But increasingly, the choreography is changing as payments, no longer treated as a back-office formality, instead step into the spotlight.

The reason? As disruptions abound and compound across supply chains and operations, the conventional B2B contract looks more and more out of step with reality. Clauses that once ensured predictable flows of goods and cash now can appear strained under the pressure of macro volatility.

And in that tension, payment structures and timing, as well as tools like virtual cards, supply chain finance and working capital, dynamic discounting, and real-time analytics are emerging not just as administrative levers, but as instruments of trust, liquidity and resilience.

See also: CFOs Who Prioritize Cash Flow Improvements Start With Receivables Innovation

Reworking Terms to Manage for New Tensions

The average B2B contract is built around stability: fixed prices, fixed payment terms and standardized invoicing cycles. Those assumptions worked well in an era when costs and lead times were relatively predictable. But recent turbulence has turned those norms into friction points.

“October often has a way of reshaping the end of the year and maybe even setting the tone for next year,” Boost Payment Solutions Chief Revenue Officer Seth Goodman told PYMNTS during a discussion for the What’s Next in Payments series, “October Surprise.”

“Payments are no longer a commodity. They’re truly a strategic advantage when properly optimized,” Goodman said.

Against this backdrop, suppliers, typically already shouldering higher input cost, are finding that payment timing and flexibility are becoming negotiation priorities right alongside pricing.

Buyers, for their part, are finding that better payment terms can unlock preferential pricing, guaranteed capacity, and priority access to scarce materials. Payment flexibility, once a transactional detail, is now a lever of strategic value.

According to findings from the 2025/2026 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index, a Visa report in collaboration with PYMNTS Intelligence, 7 in 10 “Adaptive” CFOs and treasurers in the study used working capital solutions to suppliers faster to stay agile and strengthen supplier relationships in a volatile economy.

“Many companies in the middle market struggle with unpaid invoices,”  Boost Payment Solutions CFO Mariana Lamson told PYMNTS in an interview posted this July. “Sometimes as much as 30% go unresolved monthly. That’s not just an efficiency problem. It’s a business continuity risk.”

Read more: CFOs Reimagine Flow of Funds as Volatility Becomes the Norm

The Rise of Payments as a Relationship Tool

Historically, B2B payments were the invisible plumbing of commerce. They sat behind ERP systems and AP workflows, optimized for efficiency rather than experience. But in an age of strained supply and tight liquidity, they’ve become an increasingly front-line variable in supplier relationships.

“Every single day we are spending money and we need to get an ROI on it,” Emanuel Pleitez, head of finance at Finix, told PYMNTS in an earlier interview.

At the center of this shift is choice. Companies are expanding the menu of payment instruments to align financial flows with their strategic objectives. Virtual cards, in particular, have moved from niche to mainstream. They allow buyers to pay suppliers instantly while extending their own payment terms through credit. For suppliers, they deliver faster access to cash and often lower processing risk. For buyers, they preserve working capital and offer rebate incentives that improve total cost efficiency.

In essence this can reframe the idea of “payment terms” as a conversation about mutual liquidity management rather than unilateral control. A buyer that pays early, or via a virtual card, can strengthen its supplier’s cash position, helping with potentially avoiding disruptions that may have cost far more than the float on a few invoices.

Payments are also becoming a proving ground for digital trust infrastructure in B2B commerce. Embedded finance APIs, real-time data intelligence and AI-driven risk scoring are changing how firms validate and manage transactions. These innovations are not just about efficiency; they’re about assurance.

This convergence of finance and trust mirrors a broader trend in B2B digitization: the blending of operational and relational data. Payment records, once siloed, are increasingly being used to assess supplier health, predict disruption, and model cash flow risk across networks. At the heart of these changes is a philosophical reappraisal of what fairness means in B2B commerce. The old model presumed that buyers dictated terms and suppliers absorbed risk. The new reality, shaped by systemic shocks and tighter margins, is more interdependent.

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