LONDON—Could mobile payments help revolutionize corporate cards?
David Wood, director of products at Conferma Pay, told Pymnts.com that mobile payments are increasingly becoming an essential component of the business payments landscape, providing a “consumersation” experience for business essentials, and will inevitably lead to a change in the corporate card environment.
It’s been well documented how reliant on paper checks B2B payments have been right up to and even into the pandemic — with a significant percentage of payments being done through those outdated means, Pymnts.com noted.
“The immediacy of lockdown earlier this year created an inability to create and process payments for receivables,” said Wood, who added that “pre-COVID, 25% of business transactions were checks, ACH transfers and even cash advances.”
Those methods proved difficult to use, or even impossible to use, in the rapid shift to a work-from-home environment. As a result, he said, many firms pivoted quickly toward card payments.
“It was a quick solution, but not the perfect solution,” Wood said.
But even that shift created friction — of a different sort — tied to the reliance on the distribution and the movement of this physical plastic around the business, resulting in management pain points and in some cases even payment errors, Pymnts.com said.