Straight-Through or Shut Out: The Automation Reckoning Facing B2B Suppliers

Across the multitrillion-dollar global B2B market, the future of payments is arriving faster than many expected and putting pressure on suppliers to keep up.

Being a reliable B2B supplier once meant delivering on time, offering fair prices, and responding promptly to orders and issues. Increasingly, it now means being fully integrated into your buyer’s digital infrastructure.

Consumers can order socks, smartphones and sofas with a few taps and expect real-time updates and swift delivery, so the expectations of business buyers are changing rapidly. The same Amazon-like ease, the ability to place an order, receive it and pay for it without friction, is now becoming the gold standard in B2B transactions.

This is what’s known as the straight-through B2B experience, and it is making supplier enablement critical.

The market is responding. This week, for example, Visa launched a new accounts receivable (AR) platform meant to streamline B2B virtual card payments, the Visa AR Manager. The platform supports seamless, scalable virtual card acceptance without requiring development work from financial institutions.

As procurement systems become more automated and supply chains more digitized, buyers are demanding suppliers that can transact in real time, with minimal human intervention.

Read also: B2B Payments Are Being Remade in Gen Z’s Image

From Emails to APIs: The Three Stages of B2B Automation

Historically, B2B transactions relied on email as the dominant communication method. Orders would arrive as PDF attachments, invoices would be manually entered into enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and every data transfer was a potential point of failure. This manual-plus-email model was labor-intensive, error-prone and slow. But it was familiar.

In the past decade, many suppliers graduated to batch file-based automation, a semi-automated approach where structured data files (such as CSV or XML) are shared at scheduled intervals through secure file transfer protocols. This reduced some human intervention but still fell short of real-time responsiveness.

The next — and increasingly mandatory — stage is API-based automation. APIs allow software systems to exchange data instantly, in standardized formats. In the context of B2B, APIs enable real-time order confirmations, dynamic inventory checks, automatic invoice creation and instant payment reconciliation.

This real-time, data-rich communication is what makes straight-through processing possible. It’s becoming the default expectation in sectors ranging from manufacturing and logistics to retail and healthcare. At its best, straight-through means digital purchase orders, digital confirmations, digital shipping notices, digital invoices and digital payments all seamlessly flowing through enterprise systems.

Achieving straight-through processing doesn’t require a total rip-and-replace, but it does demand a relatively future-ready tech stack. When delays and discrepancies can cost millions, buyers prefer vendors who can guarantee speed and accuracy through automation.

See also: 5 Trends Driving B2B’s Digital Shift

How Card Acceptance Drives Greater Working Capital for Suppliers

In the context of straight-through B2B, the virtual card plays a strategic role, particularly in the automation and optimization of the payment stage of the order-to-cash cycle.

“Thousands of buyers have said that they love virtual cards, and yet very few suppliers are willing to accept them despite the fact that they are really good products,” Paul Christensen, CEO of B2B payments accelerator Previse, told PYMNTS last year. “It’s obvious to see where the system is failing. It’s supplier acceptance.”

That’s the pain point that Abhishek, global head of B2B Acceptance at Visa Commercial Solutions, told PYMNTS Wednesday (May 21) that Visa is targeting with its new AR Manager.

“The capability is ubiquitous,” Abhishek said. “It works with all issuers, all acquirers and all suppliers, which has been the vision from day one… We are now in a position to say [to suppliers], if your financial institution is ready, we can help you. And we’re encouraging suppliers to let their institutions know [they’re ready].”

“We’ve expanded our capability from purely email-based automation to batch file-based automation,” Abhishek added. “In the future, it will become API-based… For those who already accept, the platform makes it easier. For those who don’t, it removes the hurdle for acceptance… They just need to send us sample batch files or emails.”

In a straight-through B2B ecosystem, where speed, automation and data integrity are critical, virtual cards are no longer just a niche FinTech tool. They are becoming a core enabler of end-to-end digital commerce, where the buyer-supplier tech stack compatibility is becoming a make-or-break factor as B2B moves beyond the back-and-forth emails and faxes of legacy processes.