Why B2B payments still run on bank transfers and spreadsheets
A decade of fintech investment has transformed how consumers pay. Business-to-business payments have not moved at the same pace. Wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers still run largely on bank transfers, spreadsheets, manual reconciliation and finance systems that do not talk to each other, and the money that reaches them arrives faster than the processes around it can absorb.
Bharat Sharma is founder and chief executive of Apex B2B, a software platform for mid-market B2B merchants that is part of the Monsoon Group. In written answers to The Datatech Times he argues that the bank transfer is not the problem, that the cost of the gap is measured first in people, and that modernising means connecting payments to everything around them rather than adding another way to pay.
"B2B payments are fundamentally more complicated than consumer payments," Sharma says. "A consumer transaction usually involves one buyer, one payment method and immediate settlement. A B2B transaction may involve negotiated prices, credit limits, payment terms, purchase orders, multiple approvers, part deliveries and an invoice settled weeks later."
There is also, in his account, a rational commercial reason why wholesalers and distributors keep using bank transfers. "These are highly competitive, low-margin businesses, and card-processing fees can materially reduce the margin on a large order. Bank payments are therefore not necessarily outdated or inappropriate; the problem is that the processes surrounding them are often fragmented and manual." A business may receive the payment efficiently and still rely on spreadsheets, bank statements and staff to identify it, match it to the right customer account and update that customer's available credit. "B2B has lagged because modernisation requires more than introducing another payment method. Payments must be connected to customer accounts, credit control, ordering, invoicing, reconciliation and the ERP."
The cost is people first
"The most immediate cost is people. Finance and credit-control teams spend significant time reviewing account applications, checking references, assigning credit limits, downloading bank information, matching payments, allocating funds and investigating discrepancies. Sales and customer-service teams are then pulled into chasing approvals and resolving account queries." As volumes grow, he says, businesses tend to add administrative staff rather than fix the process, and manual handling raises the risk of errors, duplicated effort and inconsistent decisions.
The cost can start before a customer is able to buy at all. Opening a trade account may involve forms, company checks, references, internal risk assessments and several stages of approval. Handled manually, he says, onboarding can take days or even weeks, during which a supplier may delay or lose orders from a customer who is ready to buy but has not yet been approved to purchase on account. The same friction returns when an established customer reaches its credit limit and an order goes on hold while sales contacts finance, finance reviews the account and the customer is asked to pay or request more credit.
"The cash-flow impact comes from delayed invoicing, slow reconciliation, and inconsistent collections. The growth cost comes from orders being delayed or lost and from manual processes becoming increasingly expensive as transaction volumes rise. The cumulative effect is a business carrying higher administrative costs while processing orders and credit decisions at the speed of its internal administration rather than at the speed its customers want to buy."
What consumer tools do not understand
Consumer payment tools are built around an individual choosing a product, paying the displayed price and completing the transaction at once. "A business account can include several buyers, branches, cost centres and approvers. An order may require a purchase-order number, consume part of an available credit facility, be delivered in stages and generate several invoices or credit notes." A consumer tool may collect a card payment successfully, he says, but it does not understand that wider commercial relationship, and it can introduce transaction fees a low-margin merchant struggles to absorb on a large order.
Purpose-built infrastructure, in his description, supports both immediate and account-based payments. "It should understand who is buying, what they are authorised to purchase, their agreed terms, their available credit and their overall account position." It should also let customers make full or partial payments at account level, which the merchant then allocates according to its own accounting rules, customer instructions and reconciliation processes.
The biggest measurable gains, he says, are likely to come from customer onboarding, credit approval, account reconciliation and the management of customers approaching their limits. A credit application captured digitally, checked automatically and routed to credit control only for exceptions; payments matched to the right account and reflected in its available balance in near real time; and, when a customer nears its limit, a different response from the system. "If a customer is approaching its credit limit, the system should not simply reject the order. It could allow the customer to make a full or partial account payment or request a credit review without leaving the purchasing journey." The measures he would track are account-approval time, orders held for credit review, automatic reconciliation rates, days sales outstanding and manual interventions per order.
Most mid-market businesses already hold the data that real-time visibility needs, he says. It is simply spread across the ERP, accounting software, commerce platform, payment provider, banking portal and spreadsheets. "An account may therefore have been paid but still appear over its limit until someone reconciles the transaction manually." That matters beyond reporting. "Real-time visibility is not simply a reporting feature. It directly influences whether an order can be accepted, released and fulfilled without unnecessary delay."
Investment, and the most common mistake
Sharma is careful with the investment figure that framed the question. "KPMG reported £5.4bn of UK fintech investment in H1 2025, although this represented a 5 per cent decline from H1 2024. The figure covers the wider fintech market rather than B2B fintech specifically, so we should be careful not to draw an overly narrow conclusion from it." He still reads its resilience as a sign that financial infrastructure is viewed as a long-term opportunity, and expects the next phase in B2B to be "less about creating another standalone payment option and more about embedding financial capabilities into the platforms where companies already trade." That is especially relevant to the mid-market, he says, where businesses want better capabilities but rarely have the budget or staff to assemble and maintain a stack of enterprise systems.
"The most common mistake is treating payments as an isolated checkout project." A business adds card payments or a new provider while leaving onboarding, credit approval, invoicing and reconciliation untouched, and may encourage more card use without weighing the fees against product and order margins. The starting point, he says, should be a clear picture of how an order becomes cash: how the customer is approved, how credit is assigned, how an order is authorised, how invoices are generated, how payments are identified and how exceptions are handled. Businesses can then modernise incrementally, so long as each investment contributes to a connected operating model. "Technology works best when it follows the commercial process. Automating a fragmented process can simply make the fragmentation happen faster."
Asked what B2B payments look like for a mid-market merchant in five years, he describes a change of place rather than of instrument. "Payments will become part of a connected commercial and financial journey rather than a separate activity at the end of checkout." A buyer signs in and sees its negotiated pricing, available credit, payment terms, account balance and purchasing permissions; behind the scenes, customer accounts, orders, invoices, payments and credit availability stay connected across the commerce platform, ERP and finance systems. "Finance teams will spend more time managing exceptions, risk and customer relationships, and less time moving information manually between systems." Over time, he says, that connected layer could also give merchants and their customers routes to credit and working capital through financial partners.
Apex B2B was founded in 2026 as part of the Monsoon Group, which the company says draws on 25 years of enterprise software work and more than a decade of B2B e-commerce experience.