B2B Payments Firm Bottomline Buys Nexus Systems to Grow in Real Estate

B2B payments FinTech company Bottomline has purchased procure-to-pay platform Nexus Systems, extending its capabilities into the real estate vertical.

Nexus Systems provides accounts payable (AP) and payments automation software for the real estate and property management industries, and with this acquisition, its customers and suppliers will join the 500,000 businesses using Bottomline’s Paymode-X B2B payments network, according to a Tuesday (Sept. 13) press release.

“We are on a mission to drive better business payments for businesses and financial institutions around the world,” Bottomline CEO Craig Saks said in the release. “We continue to proactively invest in a world class platform of businesses paying and getting paid digitally as the industry-leading expertise and capabilities in commercial real estate of Nexus are combined with the expertise, scale and distribution power of the Paymode-X network.”

Among the capabilities of the Nexus Systems software are procurement, purchase order approval, invoice automation and job costing, the press release said.

For the Nexus Systems customers who join the Paymode-X network, the deal will give them immediate access to Bottomline’s Premium ACH and other capabilities, as well as the ability to pay the 500,000 vendors on the Paymode-X network, per the release.

“Nexus and Paymode-X share a vision to automate the entire real estate and property management AP process, across procure-to-pay, with one solution,” Nexus Systems CEO Tom Coolidge said in the release. “Our teams mirror each other as passionate builders who take pride in the ownership of customer success.”

PYMNTS research has found that in the real estate business, landlords and property managers still lean hard on checks—not only for rent collection but also for a significant portion of B2B payments. In fact, paper checks make up 34% of real estate companies’ B2B payments.

Read more: Real Estate Slow to Transition Away From Checks

However, digital-first technologies are becoming crucial to property managers’ B2B processes as the need to maintain cash flow to and from vendors and other partners becomes more acute.