Visa today announced it has entered into a collaboration with SAP to streamline and simplify business-to-business (B2B) payments for enterprises, from businesses small to big, to government agencies and non-profit organisations. The collaboration, led out of Asia Pacific, marks the first time Visa, the world’s leading company in digital payments, and SAP, one of the world’s market leaders in enterprise application software, join forces to bring to life an innovation to embed payments into the SAP ecosystem through SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
Around 99 per cent of the world’s largest companies are SAP customers. This collaboration sets the stage for Visa and SAP to explore embedded finance in the B2B market, helping integrate a financial journey into business operations. Visa estimates that opportunities to digitise B2B payment flows today represent more than $50 trillion across Asia Pacific.
For Visa, the move is in line with its strategy to increase its footprint in the B2B space, supporting broader money movement flows between individuals, businesses and governments, beyond consumer payments. This includes accounts receivable and payable flows, corporate payments with card-based solutions and cross-border payments.
“The movement of money is becoming increasingly digital, but the bulk of transformation has been focused on the consumer space,” Stephen Karpin, Regional President of Asia Pacific, Visa, said. “There is an urgent need to modernise the way enterprises pay and enhance the B2B payment experience. Our collaboration with SAP is an exciting step in making B2B payments simpler and more intuitive as organisations can make payments immediately on SAP platforms with their Visa corporate cards, instead of having to leave their existing enterprise ecosystem and to navigate the different payment methods that their vendors accept. B2B payments needs to be intuitive, speedy and fuss-free, so organisations can spend time and resources on other aspects of their businesses.”
For SAP, this move is meant to enhance its customers’ experience in using SAP’s software to run their businesses. Running on SAP BTP, the B2B payment services will offer convenient Visa payment services to SAP customers. Injecting more automation into payments – which marks the last mile of procurement – will help enterprises drive further efficiency in their purchasing journey as they make payments securely within a few clicks.
"Our collaboration with Visa endeavours to streamline and simplify the B2B payment process and drive further efficiencies for our joint customers. Embedding Visa payment into the SAP ecosystem aims to scale and accelerate digital commerce; together empowering enterprises, from small businesses to government agencies and non-profit organisations, to make secure payments with just a few clicks, transforming the last mile of procurement," said Paul Marriott, President of SAP Asia Pacific Japan.
The embedded finance solution will be offered initially to SAP customers in Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, with plans to roll out across other markets in the region.
Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is an innovation platform optimised for SAP applications in the cloud that brings together application development and automation, data and analytics, integration, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into one unified environment. Through this new collaboration, Visa and SAP will help bridge working capital gaps in the supply chain. Under its suite of Commercial & Money Movement Solutions, Visa will deliver capabilities through SAP BTP to route commercial payments to all suppliers, whether they accept card payments or not. This solution will help businesses who are Visa cardholders make payments seamlessly and utilise their cardholder benefits, be it domestically or cross-border.
The collaboration will also help to further digitise and speed up B2B payments across Asia Pacific’s supply chains. Many businesses in Asia Pacific, especially smaller ones that tend to lack the resources to digitalise B2B payment acceptance, do not yet accept commercial card payments. It can be challenging for card-enabled businesses to pay digitally as they resort to traditional, manual and time-consuming payment methods such as cash and cheques. It also affects the cash flow for both payers and suppliers as transactions via traditional payment methods tend to take a longer time to process and complete.