Oracle CEO Sees Company’s Future as B2B Payments Network

Oracle CEO Safra Catz revealed her company would offer loan origination services for B2B clients.

She also said Monday that Oracle would focus developing its B2B transactions segment leveraging its cloud technologies stack.

Calling the financial service segment “very strategic” and “key to Oracle’s future,” Catz outlined the company’s plans for B2B transaction services as a play to leverage its existing bank relationships.

“If you’re a customer that’s buying something and you have Oracle ERP, [or] you are a company selling something and you have Oracle ERP [the] B2B transaction will be entirely automated within the cloud,” Catz said. “So you’ll submit a purchase order, the buying ERP system will submit a purchase order to B2B the selling ERP system. And if you need to borrow money, we will originate a loan with one of our banking partners.”

Counting Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase among its banking partners, Catz said Oracle’s long-term playbook includes connecting B2B transaction management with logistics and banking through its ERP, while focusing on improving user experiences in B2B transactions.

“Our ambition here is to completely automate B2B commerce between buying and selling companies that are running Oracle Cloud ERP and manage all of the financing and insurance and logistics associated with that transaction,” Catz said. “We have very strong partners in finance, insurance and logistics, so we can completely automate the entire transaction, where B2B transactions begin to look like B2C transactions.”

B2B Payments Consumerization 

Oracle’s shift isn’t surprising. From Wall Street to Main Street, businesses are pushing banks and FIs for B2B payments innovation. According to the study “Digitization Strategies: How CFOs Are Prioritizing Digital Payments To Maximize Efficiency,” a PYMNTS and Corcentric collaboration, the vast majority of firms are looking to modernize every aspect of their business payments management processes, starting with digitization.

According to Robert Johnson, senior vice president of payments at Corcentric, businesses have accelerated digitization efforts but rates of adoption across core industries, like manufacturing, are mixed.

“Now in 2022, suppliers want choices,” Johnson said. “They want to have a menu of choices of different payment modalities that the buyer can pay with. But the manufacturers are only supporting checks and ACH.”

PYMNTS research found that 94% of companies in a recent survey planned to invest “in digital technologies in at least one area of payments and finance.” Another 87% plan to invest in the future.

That push indicates the significant need for modernization, but it also highlights new risks businesses may face as they adopt digital payments. Risks such as fraud and the complexity of transitioning away from legacy payment methods that use multiple systems.

While 71% of CFOs have increased their digitation efforts since 2020, many are still struggling to develop a strategy to streamline transactions efficiently. That means many businesses will seek out third-party solutions to ease B2B transactions management, whether they are focused on modernization or launching digitization tools for the first time.

Learn more by downloading the report.