Platforms Fill Payments, Supplier Finance Gaps for Small Businesses

The goal of any business is to grow.   

Within the B2B realm, all suppliers want to serve as many buyers as they can as an increasing amount of commerce moves online. At the same time, these suppliers want assurance they can be paid in a timely fashion.

Brandon Spear, CEO of TreviPay, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in a recent interview that platforms, and directories created from the data moving across those platforms, can create B2B ecosystems and cement trust between firms.

At a high level, different sellers have different needs depending on how large they are, how multinational they are and how global their customer base is.

“What we’ve discovered is that there are significant differences between the needs of an enterprise seller that wants to engage with customers in 10 or 15 different countries and wants to satisfy all of the invoicing requirements in those countries, versus someone who operates in just a single country,” he told Webster.

For smaller firms especially, there exists a need to tap working capital and credit in order to buy the inventory and hire the staff that can turn strategy into top line torque. TreviPay, as has been documented by PYMNTS before, has made its mark addressing trade credit through automated payments and invoicing.

See also: Trade Credit, Electronic Invoices Can Be B2B Loyalty Plays

In July, the company said its TreviPay Payments and Invoicing Networks now address a broader range of business needs: The Private Network allows enterprise sellers to build closed, branded trade credit networks with invoice-based purchasing across all channels. In terms of mechanics, larger firms gain access to real-time order to cash automation.

The TreviPay Network is geared to midmarket companies that need to offer trade credit and invoicing but do not require a branded solution. The Small Business Supplier Network, not yet available but coming soon, will enable banks to offer small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) — with top lines up to about $5 million — flexible payment terms for their customers.

On that last point, the needs of the SMB are especially acute, Spear said. As much as a third of a given supply chain are served by smaller firms, and the burden of funding working capital tends to fall on their shoulders. That’s no easy task in a world where inflation is rampant, and where strong relationships with banking partners can be a lifeline.

Read more: TreviPay Launches Networks for Large, Small and Mid-Sized Businesses

Payment optionality, he said, gives smaller suppliers access to a broader buyer community that otherwise might have been hard to capture, because they want payment options.

As Spear explained it, the new payments method and invoicing network acts as a complement to satisfy the enterprise’s desire to have a range of payments choices at checkout and have payments deeply embedded into the eCommerce experience at checkout across channels.

There are ancillary benefits, too. Along the way, the platform gathers payments data on buyers — including on the timeliness of payments — to help craft directories that in turn inform suppliers of buyers’ payment reliability and integrity. In the macro environment we’re seeing at present, it can be hard to predict how financially secure a buyer might be.

“When a supplier is going into a relationship with a buyer online, they have to have context as to what the buyer’s preferred payment options are — right down to how they prefer to be invoiced,” he said (all of which can improve the collections process). That granular insight, he added, simplifies the entire order to cash process, with flexibility deeply ingrained into the mix.

Spear said that regardless of size, “If you’re a supplier, dropping a broader range of options into your payment offerings delivers a more turnkey customer experience for the buyer.”

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