Bank Transfers Aren’t The Problem: What B2B Payment Modernisation Really Means
Decades of fintech investment have transformed how consumers pay. Tapping a phone, splitting a bill, sending money to a friend in seconds; all of it became completely normal. Business payments never had that moment. Walk into most wholesalers, distributors, or manufacturers today, and you’ll find much the same setup as a decade ago: bank transfers, spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, and finance systems that don’t talk to each other.
The easy conclusion is that B2B is just behind the curve. We think that’s the wrong diagnosis, and it sends teams off fixing the wrong thing.
Our founder and CEO, Bharat Sharma, made this case in a recent interview with The Datatech Times. His point was a simple one. The bank transfer isn’t broken. What’s broken is the process wrapped around it.
B2B payments were never a checkout
A consumer payment is one buyer, one payment method, settled on the spot. A B2B order is a different beast. There’s often a negotiated price, a credit limit, agreed payment terms, a purchase order number, several people who have to approve it, deliveries that arrive in stages, and an invoice that gets settled weeks later.
Consumer payment tools were never built for any of that. A card tool can process the payment perfectly and still have no idea about the relationship behind it. It doesn’t know the account, the branches, the cost centres, how much credit is left, or what this particular buyer is even allowed to order. And for a distributor working on thin margins, pushing a big order onto cards quietly hands a slice of that margin to processing fees.
So the bank transfer sticks around for a good commercial reason, not out of habit. The payment rail was never really the issue. The money usually arrives faster than the manual workaround can keep up with.
The bill lands on people first
The real cost of this gap rarely shows up where teams expect it.
Before a new customer can place a single order, someone has to open a trade account for them. Forms, company checks, references, a risk assessment, a few rounds of sign-off. Done by hand, that can take days, sometimes weeks. And a customer who’s ready to buy can easily cool off, or take the order somewhere else, while they wait.
Once they’re up and running, finance and credit-control teams spend their days pulling bank data, matching payments, allocating funds, checking references, setting limits and chasing down discrepancies. Sales gets pulled in to unblock approvals. And when a good customer hits its credit ceiling, the order stops dead: sales calls finance, finance reviews the account, and the customer gets asked to pay down the balance or apply for more room to buy.
As volumes grow, the instinct is to throw more people at it rather than fix the process itself. So the admin bill keeps climbing, and the business ends up moving at the speed of its own back office instead of the speed its customers actually want to buy.
The mistake most teams make
This is the part most teams get wrong. They treat modernising payments as a checkout project. But bolting on card acceptance or a new provider, while leaving onboarding, credit approval, invoicing and reconciliation exactly as they were, doesn’t fix the fragmentation at all. It can even push customers toward card fees you never wanted to pay in the first place.
Real modernisation connects payments to everything they touch: customer accounts, credit control, ordering, invoicing, reconciliation and the ERP. The system underneath should know who’s buying, what they’re allowed to buy, what terms they’re on, how much credit they have left and where their account stands overall. It should also let a customer pay at the account level, in full or in part, and then allocate that payment according to the merchant’s own rules.
Get that right and the day-to-day changes completely. A credit application comes in digitally, gets checked automatically, and only reaches a person when something’s genuinely an exception. A payment lands against the right account and shows up in available credit almost immediately. And when a customer gets close to their limit, the system doesn’t just block the order. It offers them a full or partial payment, or a credit review, without making them drop out of the buying journey to do it.
Most mid-market businesses already have the data they’d need for this. It’s just scattered across the ERP, the accounting software, the commerce platform, the payment provider, the banking portal, and a few spreadsheets. That’s how an account that’s actually been paid can still look over its limit until someone reconciles it by hand. And that’s not just a reporting headache. It decides whether an order goes out today or waits until tomorrow.
Where to start
Don’t start with a product. Start with a clear picture of how an order actually becomes cash in your business: how a customer gets approved, how credit gets assigned, how an order is authorised, how invoices go out, how payments get identified, and how the exceptions get handled. Once you can see that end to end, you can modernise a step at a time, as long as every piece you add feeds into one connected way of working.
The trap is automating around the mess instead of clearing it. As Bharat puts it, “automating a fragmented process can simply make the fragmentation happen faster.”
A handful of numbers will tell you whether it’s actually working: how long account approvals take, how many orders get held for credit review, how much of your reconciliation happens automatically, your days sales outstanding, and how many manual interventions each order needs.
What the next five years look like
Where all this is heading isn’t a shiny new payment button. It’s payments quietly disappearing into the platforms companies already use to trade. A buyer signs in and sees their negotiated pricing, their available credit, their terms, their balance, and what they’re allowed to do. Behind the scenes, accounts, orders, invoices, payments, and credit availability all stay in sync across the commerce platform, the ERP, and the finance systems. Finance teams get to spend their time on exceptions, risk, and customer relationships rather than moving data from one system to the next. And over time, that same connected layer can open up new routes to credit and working capital, too.
That’s the model we’re building at Apex B2B: connected commercial and financial infrastructure for mid-market merchants, so payments stop being a bolt-on at the end of checkout and become part of how the whole business runs.
Read Bharat’s full interview with The Datatech Times: https://datatech.disruptsmedia.com/enterprise-software/why-b2b-payments-still-run-bank-transfers-and-spreadsheets
Want to see what a connected order-to-cash journey could look like for your business? Book a demo
