Digital payments aren’t just about swapping cash and paper checks for electronic methods.
Amid Wednesday’s (Sept. 18) news that Brex has launched an embedded B2B payments solution that complements the company’s corporate card and spend management platform for startups and enterprises, digital payments are transforming the ways in which companies do business and interact with their stakeholders, from suppliers and customers to financial institutions and regulators.
With more and more companies looking to streamline their operations and enhance the customer experience, embedded payments powered by credentials and tokens are emerging as a key innovation in creating frictionless transactions between B2B trading partners.
By embedding payments into the core of their digital infrastructure, businesses can create a seamless, end-to-end experience that supports not just payments, but all aspects of the B2B relationship — improving efficiency, security and collaboration across the board.
Read more: Nine Things Payments Execs Need to Know for Their 2025 Business Plans
As businesses seek more efficient ways to manage payments and working capital, embedded finance is emerging as a transformative force in B2B commerce. That’s according to Alan Koenigsberg, senior vice president and global head of large, middle market, industry verticals and working capital solutions at Visa, who told PYMNTS this summer that while embedded finance has been a staple in consumer eCommerce for years, its application in the B2B space is gaining momentum.
The shift from physical cards to digital credentials in the B2B space signals a broader transformation, with embedded payments becoming the digital hub for conducting business in an increasingly complex, interconnected global economy.
This evolution is reshaping how businesses approach payments, making them less about the mere act of transferring money and more about fostering digital connections that simplify and enhance the entire B2B transaction ecosystem.
The implications of credentials and tokenization are even more profound for B2B transactions, where complex financial supply chains, multi-tiered relationships and the need for security and efficiency drive payment innovation.
Credentials and tokens refer to digital representations of payment methods, eliminating the need for businesses to share sensitive payment data like credit card numbers with their partners. Instead, businesses use unique identifiers (credentials) and cryptographically secured placeholders (tokens) to facilitate payments. These tools can be seamlessly integrated into existing B2B processes, such as procurement, invoicing and supplier management systems.
In the B2B context, this transition enables businesses to move beyond the traditional limitations of many payment mechanisms, which were never fully optimized for B2B transactions, and which tend to involve higher values, longer time horizons and more complex payment terms — often involving multiple stakeholders within and between organizations.
Read more: How Embedded Payments Help Businesses Own Key ‘Micro Moments’
The real power of credentials and tokens in the B2B ecosystem lies in their ability to fuel embedded payments — a seamless integration of payment functionality into business platforms and workflows. Embedded payments enable businesses to automate and streamline payments as part of broader digital processes, creating frictionless commerce opportunities that go far beyond the traditional scope of financial transactions.
For many businesses, payments have historically been treated as a separate, often cumbersome process that occurs after the real value exchange has already taken place, like the delivery of goods or services.
Embedded payments, however, flip this paradigm on its head by embedding the payment function directly into business software and platforms, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, procurement portals and supply chain management tools.
In this new model, payments are not just a standalone transaction; they become an integrated part of the digital hub for doing business. By embedding payment credentials into their existing systems, businesses can automate their financial workflows, reduce friction in the payment process and create real-time visibility into payment status, approvals and cash flow. This, in turn, can accelerate decision-making, improve supplier relationships and unlock new growth opportunities.
As embedded payments and the use of credentials and tokens continue to gain traction in the B2B world, the future of business payments will increasingly be shaped by a digital hub model. In this model, payments are no longer viewed as a discrete, manual process that happens after the fact. Instead, payments become a dynamic, real-time and automated component of broader business operations.
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