Future of corporate payments

Payments are an important enabler for running the day-to-day operations of corporates. This includes cross-border payments, vendor payments, supplier payments, salary payments, and forex payments. Corporates expect their banking partners to provide fast, secure, and reliable payment solution(s) that enable them to better manage their payables and receivables, thus improving their overall working capital positions. For banks, the drive towards corporate payments transformation has been relatively slow.

However, the corporate payments industry has witnessed an unprecedented change over the past 24 months. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic affected almost all global businesses, which were reliant on human intervention or physical presence. These businesses had their operating models built on accepting traditional payments methods, such as cheques and cash, which were severely challenged due to lack of mobility. To sustain their day-to-day operations, including payments to vendors/suppliers/employees, corporates had to work with their banking partners to digitise the manual processes and re-define their operating models to start accepting additional digital payments methods. This led to a focussed transformation covering the entire corporate payment lifecycle and digitising as much of the value chain as possible, while also looking at new business and operating models to sustain the operations.