The drivers of change - unlocking transformational growth to help businesses thrive

Businesses today face unprecedented challenges, driven by technology transformation, regulation, globalisation, rising customer expectations, and competition. To survive and thrive, businesses need to use technology and data to enable faster, smarter decisions. Part of this involves streamlining operations and driving efficiencies with unified services, potentially allowing them to grow and expand into global markets.

This may sound daunting, but there are a number of tools and enablers that are available to business owners to support this journey. Payments is a key enabler and goes far beyond a simple transaction. Payments technology can improve cashflow and forecasting, unlock efficiencies and automation and data insights and reduce fraud.

The next generation of payment solutions will offer flexibility to pay anyone, anywhere, across devices and channels. It’ll be driven by digital-first ways to pay and sophisticated working capital tools with virtual payment capabilities. The importance of this was highlighted in Visa’s latest Growth Corporates Working Capital Index, which showed that 80% of mid-market companies with the highest working capital efficiency recognise the versatility of virtual cards to act both as a payables and financing solution¹.

On top of this, AI will deliver deeper insights and powerful data that will supercharge the decision-making process and automate outcomes. AI is also a powerful tool, or ally, in the fight against fraud, with hundreds of AI products battling to protect buyers, sellers and financial institutions while playing a significant larger role in shaping the future of payments.

The embedded opportunity
There were many exciting topics covered at Visa Commercial Day in London this week - an event with over a hundred clients where we heard from a range of speakers covering the future of payments, B2B growth sectors and how we can enable SMBs and creators. However, one topic I’m particularly passionate about is the significant opportunity embedded finance and embedded payments can unlock in commercial and transactional banking.

In the SMB space alone, estimates show embedded finance has the potential to expand the overall banking market by $92 billion¹, and these solutions have the potential to transform companies' experiences in managing and growing their businesses.

With advanced, integrated tools for analytics and forecasting, businesses can access sophisticated insights that predict financial needs - ultimately helping them make the right strategic decisions, quicker and easier than ever before.

Embedded payment solutions, like virtual cards, bring the convenient, secure and hassle-free experiences we enjoy in our personal lives into the professional world—while unlocking an almost limitless range of payment use cases. Across both centralised and decentralised spend—from strategic purchasing to on-demand purchases and discretionary spend, virtual is elevating the control, transparency, speed and operational efficiency of business operations and expense management.

When you add acceptance and enablement solutions into the equation for corporates, like with Visa’s integration with SAP / Taulia, it translates to automation of key steps, improving of buyer-supplier relationships with smoother payment experiences and enhanced working capital. For issuers, it means unlocking B2B payables and keeping them at the centre of corporate client relationships.

This thinking can be translated to different SaaS platforms, for example, enterprise resource planning systems, accounting platforms and independent software vendors, regardless of the size and type of business these players serve.

Embedded payments help to generate new revenue streams, create stickiness and enhance the customer experience throughout the process flows. They provide strategic opportunities for us to continue to dream, design and build the future of payments. Visa can help drive transformative change through embedded finance in commercial payments and these developments are more than concepts – they are already driving measurable results today for payment providers. And every day, we see more demand and accelerating adoption.

Exploring the emerging B2B trends
As I’ve outlined, the B2B payments ecosystem is vast and complex, with different levels of maturity. This presents a lot of emerging untapped opportunities for players to leverage in order to drive growth. For example, B2B Travel and Fleet & Mobility are two areas within established verticals where the ecosystem is already capturing substantial growth. Other rapidly growing areas at a tipping point include workplace benefits and insurance. Then, other more nascent but still attractive areas undergoing high pace of change and digital disruption, and are very well positioned for commercial issuance, include Freight, Logistics & Maritime and Digital Media.

Mobile innovation is also more important than ever for unlocking business spend. Mobile wallets are growing – outpacing contactless cards in key European markets, with ~39% of European F2F card payments volumes already being made using mobile wallets². And Europe is very much a global leader in this space, with 9 out of 11 countries with the highest mobile wallet penetration being in the region³.

Empowering businesses
Our vision within Visa Commercial Solutions (VCS) is to deliver leading B2B payment solutions that empower our partners to meet all corporate payment needs. This vision is built on three pillars of support: research and data; cutting-edge business solutions; and expertise based on decades of deep local knowledge of the global payments ecosystem.

Delivering on this future presents significant opportunities but also challenges. While there are routes to becoming preferred and trusted partners for businesses, strengthening loyalty, solving pain points and attracting new clients, innovation isn’t easy.

Collaboration and partnerships are crucial to building a clear vision and roadmap, as well as instilling trust and confidence in the business and its products. At VCS, we’ll continue to push boundaries and collaborate with partners to develop tailored strategies for product innovation, GTM plans, sales, and marketing. We’ll co-create solutions and turbo-charge development, based on insights trends, and analytics, to promote and protect businesses and economies.