This Week in B2B: Smokestack Upgrades, CFO Intelligence, SMB Innovation

The B2B innovation landscape has never been more exciting than right now.

Ongoing technological advances are driving a paradigm shift, allowing B2B firms to streamline and digitize nearly every element of their operations — particularly the workflows and processes surrounding B2B payments.

As businesses seek more efficient ways to manage payments and working capital, embedded finance is emerging as a transformative force in B2B commerce. Separately, PYMNTS Intelligence’s “2024-2025 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index,” commissioned by Visa, identified the ways businesses are adopting digital solutions to optimize cash flow and drive growth in a competitive global market. The data indicates that over 80% of chief financial officers (CFOs) and treasurers have utilized working capital solutions, marking a 13% increase year over year.

But the data also showed that some sectors are gaining more from working capital, and doing more with it, than their peer industries.

The innovation we found this week centered around how digital transformation is penetrating even long-established, traditionally analog industries; the growing importance of business intelligence platforms and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven solutions in financial decision-making and operational resilience; and how tools targeted toward small businesses highlight a shift toward digital solutions empowering small businesses with access to funds, data and operational efficiencies.

See also: Here’s What Excites Payments Experts About Embedded Finance’s Future

Bringing Digital Transformation to Traditional Industries

Waste management, encompassing recycling, construction, demolition and more, is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry in the U.S. alone, with increasing demand for innovative solutions.

For the B2B Payments 2024 event, PYMNTS’ Karen Webster heard from TruckPay President and CEO Barry Honig about how digital logistics orchestration solutions are bringing a material change to materials management, and why digital payments are at the center of reshaping how the world’s waste is collected, transported and paid for.

And it’s not just waste management that’s going digital. The metals procurement space is, too. For B2B Payments Month 2024, Webster discussed the present and future digital prospects of the metals industry with Shep Hickey, CEO at metal digital marketplace Bryzos, Ryan Ayesh, president at supplier Metal Pros, and Jason Koller, director of sales at steel supplier ANCO Steel.

“The metals space is not the first thing to be thought of when digital is being discussed, and the first thing I like to do is challenge that thinking,” Hickey said. “Because if you go out in any fabrication warehouse or fulfillment center, there’s technology all over the place. Digital clearly represents value to these businesses.”

Still, digital transformation isn’t as easy as flipping a switch. PYMNTS also analyzed why, for companies with extensive legacy systems, the transition to a modern B2B payment platform requires time and calculated investment into the operational overhaul. Legacy infrastructure, often built on fragmented systems and siloed data, cannot easily adapt to the real-time, integrated functionality that today’s tools offer. The lack of flexibility in older systems creates friction for companies seeking seamless integration and transparency.

Empowering Small Businesses

Per a Thursday (Oct. 31) report, Square — an arm of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Block — is expanding its card offering, Square Card, into the U.K. for merchants seeking quicker funding access. This marks the first time the business card will be available outside of North America since it launched in 2019.

“We’ve had some great feedback about the benefits of having instant access to funds which really helps our small business sellers to run and grow, as we know that the number one reason small businesses fail in the UK is due to problems with cash flow,” the company said.

Elsewhere in the small-business marketplace, small and medium-sized business (SMB)-focused cash management solutions provider Centime announced Wednesday (Oct. 30) it has teamed with expense management firm Fyle.

Moving online, Shopify on Tuesday (Oct. 29) introduced Shopify Finance, a hub housing all of the eCommerce platform’s financial solutions. The offering lets merchants access Shopify Balance, Shopify Credit, Shopify Capital, Shopify Bill Pay and Shopify Tax from one place built into the Shopify admin.

Markaaz CEO Hany Fam told PYMNTS this week there’s a data gap that exists for small businesses — a lack of information about them that makes banks shy away from extending credit or spurs FinTechs to “offload” them from their platforms mere months after they’ve been onboarded.

A full 30% of businesses go to their financial institutions or FinTechs and get turned away, Fam said.

Against that backdrop, Luke Voiles, chief executive officer of embedded solutions FinTech Pipe, told Karen Webster that the point of interaction — for capital, for credit — is shifting from the bank branches to the software platforms SMBs leverage to help them do everything from match up with customers to manage the back office. That’s especially true, he said, when the banks’ definition of small businesses are the companies with $25 million in sales, so they don’t give these smaller firms a second glance.

Business Intelligence and the Finance Function

Chase for Business expanded the availability of a business intelligence platform to all Chase business checking accounts at no additional cost, the bank said Wednesday; while that same day ABBYY announced it is introducing new capabilities for AI to help companies bolster automation.

A day earlier on Tuesday, Crater launched AI-powered accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) solutions for banks, credit unions and B2B platforms.

Adrienne Bloom, managing director, head of Asia Pacific financial institutions, corporate banking at Bank of America, told PYMNTS that chief financial officers (CFOs) and treasurers will have to rethink how they manage liquidity risk for their companies. They’ll also have to grapple with new approaches to their B2B payment strategies.

“The role of the treasurer and the CFO has evolved and will continue to evolve,” she told PYMNTS. “Now they need to be cash managers, and they need to be balance sheet managers … It’s becoming a bigger and broader job.”

PYMNTS on Wednesday unpacked how, with cyber threats a growing challenge for businesses of all sizes, the role of CFOs and senior leaders in cyber resilience is growing as critical as their oversight in finance or compliance.

Register now to access all streaming and on-demand videos from the B2B Payments 2024 event series.