Trade Credit, eInvoices Can Up B2B Loyalty

Over the course of two calendar years that have been impacted by the pandemic, several general business trends have emerged and don’t look likely to reverse, including digitization, digital transformation and a move toward greater eCommerce and digital-first channels.

“When that becomes a priority, then often things like the payment pieces are an important adjunct to those overall transformation strategies, so we’ve definitely seen those themes that exploded in 2020 continue through 2021,” Brandon Spear, CEO of TreviPay, a global B2B payments company, told PYMNTS.

As far as the year to come, Spear said he is tactically cautious about making grand predictions in an uncertain environment, but he noted that some of the hardest-hit industries, such as airlines and travel in general, are starting to rebound. Of course, omicron — or the next variant of COVID-19 — may affect that. But as of now, TreviPay’s customers are continuing their digital transformations.

“My takeaway is that although there are a lot of similarities with where we were in 2020, I think we’re in a much better place overall in terms of the resilience of the businesses, the amount of cash they have and how they’ve adapted to this changing world,” Spear said.

Moving to Digital-First Approaches to Everything

Among those adaptations is the widespread uptake of digital-first approaches to everything, including payments. That means B2B customers are expecting the B2C-like experiences that they’ve grown accustomed to in their everyday lives.

Although B2B transactions are significantly more complex than a typical one-to-one consumer purchase, that doesn’t mean companies can’t create a comparably slick and seamless customer experience. Beyond that, Spear said he sees more and more of his customers wanting to curate the whole experience for their own customers, vendors or business partners.

“What that means for service providers like us is that you really have to expose everything you do through services or [application programming interfaces (APIs)], so the end customer can insert your capabilities at the right points in the relationship they have with their customer,” Spear explained.

While demand for TreviPay’s services has been robust in many industries, demand from manufacturers has been particularly strong as they are reinventing their distribution models and go-to-market approaches post-pandemic, in an effort to get closer to their end customers.

“That change, that desire to have a direct relationship with the end customer, is creating massive demand for services like ours because, fundamentally, while a manufacturer might want to have a direct relationship with a business that’s 50 people in size, they don’t necessarily have the internal capacity or capability to deal with tens or hundreds of thousands of end customers,” Spear said.

Reinventing Go-To-Market Models

Similarly, retailers are reinventing their go-to-market models and focusing on B2B customers for the first time. And, across the board, companies in all industries are moving to eCommerce.

It’s also increasingly common to see trade credit evolving into a loyalty play, and to see businesses making sure their customers can get invoices electronically if they want those invoices loaded directly into their systems. Spear said he has seen that companies making these changes get more business from their customers.

“Our hypothesis is that if it’s easier to do business with you than with your competition, ultimately your customers will buy more from you,” Spear said. “Being integrated with them, having this data flow seamlessly into their accounts payable or procurement software, is a way to meet those buyers where they want to transact with you.”

Preparing for More Emphasis on AML/KYC and Other Regulations

Looking ahead, Spear said that in addition to COVID-19 variations, regulation in the FinTech space is something to watch. That’s a real possibility, he added, so companies should have their house in order.

“I expect more emphasis on things like [know your customer (KYC)], [anti-money laundering (AML)] and some of these other types of activities that, if you’re in the financial services sector, you’re expected to be really good at,” Spear said.

He said he also expects omnichannel solutions to continue evolving. Among B2B companies, that includes an eCommerce channel and a salesperson-led channel. Among retail companies, there’s also the in-store experience and point-of-sale (POS) experience.

POS integration to introduce a new payment type can be very onerous for retailers’ IT departments, Spear said, so TreviPay has built capabilities that are accessible via an API so the retailer can use an app to integrate into the POS. That way, the retailer gets both the biometric ID of the holder of the device when they’re checking out as well as all the POS data onto an invoice.

“We spent a lot of time and energy trying to streamline and simplify that in-store experience, particularly for the retailers,” Spear said.