Darren Blair: Are B2B payments fit for eCommerce?

The ultimate goal is to make payment a more convenient, accessible and secure experience. The same goes for the world of business. The subtle difference is that organisations need the ability to add more layers of control to the ecommerce purchasing environment at work.

This week Facebook intensified its push into eCommerce as the demand for online shopping is continually growing. With Venmo, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Facebook Pay – there’s really no shortage of ways to pay online or give people money via your phone. It`s endlessly fascinating to witness the innovation that the social networks and tech companies are bringing to the table.

With the staggering growth of online shopping amid the coronavirus pandemic, organisations are on their toes looking for ways to digitise and remove payment blockers, and do that fast.

The ultimate goal is to make payment a more convenient, accessible and secure experience. The same goes for the world of business. The subtle difference is that organisations need the ability to add more layers of control to the eCommerce purchasing environment at work.

Payment decision-making is often centralised. But five months into COVID, the controls you need to decentralise payments have to be put in place. With employees working from home, the ability to monitor and approve becomes far more difficult. With once-centralized procurement teams now dispersed into a work-from-home ecosystem, the controls and workflows that once consolidated procurement spend management are not applicable anymore.

This is an opportunity for organisations to be tactful about the electronic payment methods they deploy. Virtual card transaction are forecast to grow by 10% driven by businesses needing to authorise spend remotely as a result of remote working. Virtual, tokenised payment methods offer the controls and create the data that organizations and their teams need to gain visibility into spend across categories and departments in real time.

This drive to embrace digitisation for B2B payments has also coincided with the rise of B2B eCommerce that can similarly support a remote purchasing environment. That’s a trend likely to stay as organizations further pursue a digital, streamlined purchasing process that offers a better experience for a procurement professional while also facilitating data generation for enhanced spend control and visibility.

References

https://www.pymnts.com/news/social-commerce/2020/facebook-boosts-ecommerce-platform-with-accelerator

https://www.juniperresearch.com/press/press-releases/virtual-card-adoption-accelerates-to-over-$5

About Conferma Pay

Conferma Pay is a global financial technology company. We design and integrate virtual payment systems that provides a more efficient, seamless and secure way to pay for for businesses.

Travel Meets Payment

Conferma Pay was born in Manchester in 2005. Since then we have connected over 700 TMCs, and directly integrate with all the major GDSs and OBTs. Our roots lie in corporate travel payment integration.

We enable our payment providers to flow virtual cards into the preferred purchasing process of any business travel buyer. Crucial to this is our network of banking partners, who have issued virtual cards in over 200 countries, in 40 currencies with over 45 commercial banking partners via all major card networks.

Our ecosystem continues to expand to meet the growing requirements of our global customer base.

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