Personalized Payment Experiences Pave Way for Streamlined B2B eCommerce

With more businesses selling online or via mobile apps, more consumers are hopping online to shop and pay. Merchants are therefore pressed to ensure that they are delivering cross-border payments experiences that are fast and seamless while also supporting payment preferences that vary widely from market to market.

This rise of eCommerce has led customers to develop high expectations for simple, transparent, secure digital payment experiences, as reported in “The New Singularity,” a PYMNTS and USEND collaboration.

Get the report: The New Singularity

B2B eCommerce is enjoying a similar rise, driven in part by the digitally savvy millennials who are moving into managerial positions with purchasing authority. Comfortable with digital payment and self-service capabilities, they’ve more or less abandoned traditional modes of purchasing goods.

That has presented a challenge to wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers dealing with wholesale, as B2B transactions often carry a higher price tag than business-to-consumer (B2C) purchases. This means that online merchants need to double down on building trust and high-touch payment experiences while still capitalizing on the efficiency digitization affords.

Meeting Expectations in the Cross-Border Arena

The great digital shift has enabled all sorts of merchants, particularly small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to move beyond their home territories and across borders to tap new markets, USEND Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer Ran Grushkowsky told PYMNTS.

Read more: Compliance Automation Critical in Making X-Border Payments Faster and Cheaper

Not all payment capabilities are created equal here. Businesses and consumers expect their banks to deliver a consistent user experience (UX) across numerous digital channels. This means financial institutions (FIs) need to provide flexible cross-border payments offerings that are compatible with a wide array of digital technologies.

Third-party application programming interfaces (APIs) are a cost-effective way for banks to support these functions — far better than the alternative, rebuilding their IT infrastructures from scratch, which takes more time and resources than many can afford.

APIs deliver omnichannel experiences using data gathering and analytics. They can be integrated with banks’ or eCommerce businesses’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which gather data from those institutions’ digital applications. End users therefore encounter the same personalized banking and payments experiences across every channel.

The infrastructural flexibility APIs provide also gives banks and other FIs access to a broad array of back-end technologies that can facilitate smoother cross-border transactions. Information from these technologies can then be used to streamline and automate digital cross-border payments while providing the real-time payments data end users need to track the progress of their cross-border transactions.

Remaining Competitive in a Global eCommerce Marketplace

To remain competitive in an increasingly global eCommerce marketplace, FIs and merchants must provide their customers with frictionless payment experiences. This means enabling fast, simple and transparent cross-border payments while ensuring data security and guaranteeing compliance with a host of global regulations.

With the help of third-party APIs, global FIs and enterprises can address these challenges head-on. APIs designed to address regulatory compliance and data security challenges can help streamline cross-border payments further.

With APIs, businesses can access customer data, leveraging this insight to develop innovative products and service offerings that engage customers and expand their global reach.