|
Vertical Markets: Winning the B2B Gold |
|
|
|
In the merchant acquiring world, business-to-business (B2B) transactions represent a “blue ocean of opportunity,” insists John Hayes, CEO of FTRANS Corp., an Atlanta A/R solutions provider. “Annual trade credit transactions, at more than $18 trillion in volume, are more than 10 times the total dollar value of credit card transactions,” he notes. It’s a huge market with very low credit card penetration. Moreover, acquirers have a powerful ally in selling supplier card acceptance: large procurement organizations are asking—or telling—suppliers to start taking card payments.
Checks still dominate B2B settlement with a 74 percent share, down from 81 percent in 2004, but ACH transactions are growing faster than card transactions for B2B settlement. To expand their toehold in B2B payments, card players have revived EIPP (electronic invoice presentment and payment) ventures that seek to marry payments to electronic communication networks. MasterCard introduced a new B2B payments gateway in October, an electronic network that connects trading partners for settlement and settlementrelated communication. First Data Corp. and Wells Fargo Bank quickly signed on as participants. American Express bought Harbor Payments and is using it as a foundation for the payments part of its new S2S (source-tosettlement) service, and JPMorgan Chase bought Xign, which now supports its B2B order-to-pay solution.
Download the full PDF
|
Information Resources