Much has changed in the two months since Sunil Rajasekar became CEO of Billtrust.
“Depending on who you talk to,” he told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, “we are already in a deep recession — or there’s a recession coming.”
Right now, he said, the focus for finance teams at enterprises large and small is holding onto cash and maximizing efficiency. In doing so, he said, CFOs and other executives are getting back to basics, and eliminating extraneous activities and expenses.
That’s due in part because of the high cost of capital — and the fact that getting that capital in the first place is no easy task.
“Though the past 10 years,” he said, “well, that was a crazy time. That was when money was ‘free,’” he said, “and everything was about growth. Nowadays that’s not going to work. You have to make a profit. You need to be able to fund your own expenses.”
For providers, Billtrust among them, that are focused on helping enterprise clients manage and modernize accounts receivables processes, now’s the time to step out of the proverbial shadows.
As he noted of the appeal inherent in Billtrust’s services and products — bringing B2B payments fully into the 21st century: “We’re a company that helps you get paid.” Leveraging his past experience as president of SaaS platform Mindbody, focused on wellness, he said Billtrust is on track to become an operating system for business payments.
The untapped market is huge, he said, noting that accounts receivable software penetration is only about 24% of firms, which means 76% of businesses are still patching together legacy systems, are still relying on manual processes … and thus cash flow management is inefficient at best. Some of the world’s most sophisticated, billion-dollar companies are still dealing with paper.
As the macro headwinds continue to gather, he said, there’s a mindset change in the works, as CFOs are making the commitment to move away from traditional back-end flows and are working with their own vendors to prod them into embracing digital payments and workflows.
“I compare what’s happening on the B2B side to the transformation with what’s we’ve all been through on the consumer side,” he told Webster. “It’s just that the payments are much larger.”
Only a few years ago, he said, we as consumers got invoices and bills in the mail, and paid them with checks that found their way into the mailbox too. The great digital shift, he said, has helped usher in a new awareness of what technology can do.
Billtrust’s platform, he said, integrates the payment lifecycle for customers across dozens of verticals, beginning with setting up credit, setting up invoices, getting them paid, and reconciling those payments. As 2023 progresses, he said, there’s apt to be more volume coming through digital channels and onto Billtrust’s platform.
And looking ahead, he told Webster, “I aspire for us to be much bigger — to be more than double our size from where we are now.” Billtrust has processed $1 trillion in invoice dollars, with more than $49 billion in total payments volume crossing its platform.
Growth, he added, may get a tailwind from “one or two” transformative merger and acquisition activities over the next few years. And, he said, as Billtrust went private at the end of last year, the company has the benefit of being out of the glare of the public company spotlight: “We can take a step back and make the changes and investments with the longer term in mind.”
As he told Webster, “there’s a lot more work to do — but the market’s playing to our favor.”
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