Chief financial officers (CFOs) expect their businesses to realize several benefits from digitizing payments — among them are faster communication and better collaboration with both customer and vendors.
That’s according to “Business Payments Digitization,” a PYMNTS and Corcentric collaboration based on a survey of 400 CFOs who work at firms generating between $400 million and $2 billion in annual revenue. It found that when it comes to communicating with customers, 65% of the CFOs believe digitization will increase the speed, 54% believe it will introduce new forms of communication and 48% believe it will increase the quality.
Get the report: Business Payments Digitization
They expect similar results with vendors. In fact, 65% of CFOs believe digitization will increase the speed of communication with vendors, 44% believe it will introduce new forms and 48% believe it will increase the quality.
Making the Invisible Visible
Corcentric President and COO Matt Clark told PYMNTS in a March interview that in the healthcare, insurance and financial services verticals, for example, there is friction surrounding payments and communication between providers, between firms and with end customers.
Read more: Tackling Transparency Problems Improves B2B Payments in Healthcare, Insurance
Clark noted that along the life cycle of a typical transaction in those industries, there can be several entities involved in a transaction — and payments can be split among different senders and recipients. Any disjointed payment strategies among constituents can amplify friction, keeping payments from getting where they need to go.
“When it party A going to pay party B?” Clark said. “Is that transaction required for party C to get paid?”
Clark said an important strategy in improving payments lies with making the invisible visible — uncovering and spotlighting the interdependency of payments and communications across various verticals.
Strengthening Ties
Beyond those benefits, the CFOs who were surveyed for the report are looking forward to better collaboration among internal teams. Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed said they expect digitization to increase the speed of communication across their organization, 61% said they expect it to introduce new forms of communication, and 51% said they expect it to increase the quality.
Many CFOs see digitization projects as a way to help transform how their companies run and reposition themselves to strengthen their ties with customers and suppliers. CFOs’ efforts to digitize their firms’ payment processes have also enabled them to realize improved operational efficiency and better collaboration among employees.
These benefits are crucial, as executives and their companies are finding themselves at an inflection point where they can position themselves for long-term changes to the economy, which have already included a higher portion of the workforce working remotely and a dramatic increase in online commerce.
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