Say Goodbye to Manual Processes With a Digitized Payment Processing Platform
Manual paperwork is every finance organization’s kryptonite – slow, tedious and prone to errors. This is why switching to a digitized payment processing platform is important. This is because the right provider can offer many benefits. They can lower transaction fees, allow buy now pay later (BNPL) and digital wallet features and ensure compliance with industry regulations.
Reduced Risk of Fraud
Fraudulent digital payments are a significant problem, resulting in lost fees for businesses and consumers. A recent study found that most illegitimate transactions involve stolen card information or fake accounts.
To combat this, leading B2B payment solutions use machine learning and artificial intelligence to bolster security and reduce the risk of fraud. These technologies can verify the identity of a user by monitoring their device, IP address, and other factors to prevent unauthorized transactions.
Additionally, these systems can provide a clear trail for a transaction that helps reduce data entry errors and the risk of payments being diverted to an unauthorized account. This can reduce the costs of settling B2B invoices, automate manual processes and increase revenue. B2B digital payment methods also reduce the time needed to process a payment and can allow for instant cash application, cutting down on processing costs.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
As the B2B world continues to shift towards more remote and hybrid work arrangements, customers demand a seamless billing and payment experience closer to what they’re used to as consumers. Merchants that can meet these customer expectations are in a much better position to drive incremental sales and growth. However, this can be challenging for many traditional merchants, especially when integrating digital payment options into their existing customer offerings. Studies have shown that customer satisfaction is crucial in determining the success of new technology like mobile payments. This study validates a model for understanding how user perception and usage satisfaction can impact the adoption of mobile payment services. It also demonstrates that perceived risk and trust are important antecedents of customer satisfaction and that customer satisfaction is a reasonable predictor of loyalty to mobile payment services.
Streamlined Operations
A digitized payment processing platform enables businesses to process invoices and payments promptly, which is especially important during the pandemic. This can be accomplished through automated and optimized workflows that eliminate manual processes and have a faster time to value. It also enables businesses to onboard payees more quickly. For instance, a global payments solution can allow you to easily collect all the data you need from vendors by offering an onboarding API that only takes minutes to integrate. It also will enable approvers to authorize payments remotely and reduces delays caused by slow approval workflows. This can save your business a lot of money in terms of cash flow.
Increased Efficiency
With the massive shift to remote and hybrid work environments, traditional manual invoice and payment approval processes have become unsustainable. Accounts payable (AP) teams need a faster and more streamlined way to process and send payments to suppliers. Global payment platforms allow businesses to onboard payees with a single, automated workflow. This reduces the time it takes to collect critical data from suppliers and creates a centralized structure for approving payments. In addition, embedding payment processing within ERP systems enables select processors to pass along more levels of data with each transaction, which lowers interchange fees. For example, product codes, invoice numbers, order details, freight amounts, and payment dates can be sent to banks with each authorization.
Lower Costs
The costs of processing payments have traditionally been high, resulting in delays. However, a B2B digitized payment platform allows businesses to process payments instantly with instant cash application and automatic reconciliation. This drastically cuts data entry errors and fraud risks while saving time, money and reducing paperwork.
Additionally, a global payments platform can pass on transaction fees to payees and even offer flexible fee-splitting options to increase transparency with suppliers. Businesses can also hold payments until a certain threshold is reached to improve margins and boost cash flow. The vast benefits of a digitized payment processing platform make it an absolute necessity for merchants to adopt to maintain their competitive edge in the market. Digital payments can greatly improve business visibility, efficiency, and profitability by minimizing fraud risks, security breaches and manual processes.