Millennial Buyers Are Driving Force Behind B2B Digitization

The B2B space’s steady trend toward digitization is continuing, with a growing share of interactions between B2B buyers and sellers taking place digitally.

This move toward virtual B2B platforms is occurring amid shifting workplace demographics, with millennials — widely regarded as the first “digital-native” generation — steadily accounting for growing portions of the global workforce.

Millennials are already responsible for making three-quarters of professional B2B purchasing decisions, as reported in “Innovating B2B Payments,” a PYMNTS and i2c collaboration.

Get the report: Innovating B2B Payments

These decision makers have an affinity for faster, mobile payment experiences, as well as innovative payment options, such as virtual cards.

Bringing B2B Processes in Line With Millennials’ Expectations

This demographic shift could be a key driver behind the push to automate legacy B2B processes to bring them more in line with the seamless payment experiences millennials expect as consumers.

“Considering the pace of innovation and high consumer adoption rates, the payments industry is primed for even more innovation throughout 2022,” i2c Chief Product Officer Ava Kelly wrote in a PYMNTS eBook.

Read more: Digital Commerce Will Continue Its Dominance in 2022

There is significant interest among firms’ decision makers in accessing and offering innovative payment experiences, such as receiving instant payments and being able to make digital disbursements.

B2B payments have been moving toward digitization for many years as more and more firms recognize the need to update their existing systems to take advantage of electronic payments, and most B2B buyers now expect purchasing experiences that mirror those of business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions.

Examining the Role of Payments Processors

This means businesses need to offer and support quick, innovative B2B payment experiences that go beyond paper-based payment and invoicing processes, and they need the proper tools to do so.

This, in turn, makes ensuring one’s payment processor can allow businesses to keep pace with these developments key.

Examining the role of their payments processors and how they may be tapping technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to reduce frictions or boost the speed of incoming and outgoing funds could motivate companies to strive for faster B2B payment automation.

AI can also help firms better analyze and sort payments data — eliminating cumbersome manual processes — as well as enhance their payment processing overall.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are also gaining traction as a key technology that will make digital payment processes swifter and more efficient.

Modernizing legacy infrastructure and manual payment processes via APIs and AI can allow businesses to offer innovative payment experiences.

Using virtual cards for B2B payments can speed payments and add security, for example, as these cards generate single-use numbers specifically for businesses’ vendors, reducing transaction risks. They can also enable firms to more successfully compete in the expanding global B2B space.

Virtual cards may well prove ideal for firms over the next few years, especially as the frictions associated with outdated payment methods grow more cumbersome and costly.

Companies that fail to examine the weaknesses of their manual B2B payment processes and adopt innovations like these will find themselves falling further behind their competitors as the digitization and globalization of commercial payments continues to grow.