Payment acceptance inside large suppliers has traditionally operated like a utility. As long as money showed up and could be matched to an invoice, the system was considered successful.
But that worldview is rapidly collapsing. The confluence of inflationary pressure, tightening working capital cycles, digitized B2B payments, and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) are forcing suppliers to reconsider the fundamental question of which payments they should accept, from whom, and under what terms.
“We think the supplier perspective on acceptance strategy has evolved quite a bit,” Billtrust Senior Vice President, Payments, Kunal Patel told PYMNTS. “The inflection point a few years ago was suppliers or merchants deciding that they need to stand up a payment acceptance policy that is more aligned or reflective of their business objectives.”
What once looked like back-office machinery has become an emerging instrument of margin management and competitive leverage.
Because the traditional one-size-fits-all payment portal is itself emblematic of an earlier digital era: standardized, efficient, but ultimately indiscriminate. It offered every buyer the same menu of options regardless of order size, margin profile, creditworthiness, or strategic importance.
“They just stood up a place to pay and all the buyers landed in the same spot, and they paid how the platform enabled them to pay,” Patel said.
For suppliers managing hundreds or thousands of corporate customers, the model was convenient but blunt.
But what’s emerging now, he said, is something altogether more intentional.
Payment Acceptance Shifts Strategy
As margin pressure intensifies, suppliers are designing a more nuanced architecture where payment acceptance rules vary by buyer segment.
“Suppliers are moving away from a one-size-fits-all acceptance policy,” Patel said. “They’re seeking to segment buyers or cohort their customer set in a more sophisticated manner.”
The logic is intuitive. A card payment from a low-margin buyer costs the same to accept as one from a high-margin buyer, even though the relative impact on profitability might be drastically different. Likewise, a buyer with slow payment habits might benefit from card float at the supplier’s expense, while a highly reliable buyer might just as easily have paid via ACH at near-zero cost.
Billtrust’s own payments platform now allows suppliers granular control — “buyer by buyer,” Patel emphasized — over which payment methods are surfaced, on what terms, and at what cost.
For example, if a CFO is fixated on working capital efficiency, the payment environment can reflect that. If the commercial team wants frictionless acceptance for retention-critical customers, the platform can adapt.
“The two main things,” Patel said, “are aligning that payment acceptance policy to the business objective, and ensuring there’s cohesion across all the payment locations or environment.”
The Next Generation of Virtual Cards
For all their promise, virtual cards inadvertently introduced a paradox. They offered suppliers faster funds, richer remittance data, and lower fraud risk. Yet in practice, their delivery mechanism often emailed PDFs or one-off card numbers, creating exactly the kind of operational sprawl that digital transformation was meant to eliminate.
“The supplier starts to receive an increasingly large amount of emailed card volume,” Patel said, adding that AR clerks must sift through the messages, extract payment data manually, and process transactions in a terminal, which is an error-prone process that can create scaling issues across AR organizations.
“A lot of these suppliers have an acceptance policy that’s managed by technology in other environments,” he added. “But on the virtual card side, because the AR departments are opening the emails themselves, it’s extremely difficult to adhere to some policy.”
Billtrust’s answer to this dilemma is its digital lockbox, a kind of interception layer that catches virtual card payments before they reach the supplier. Through its Business Payments Network (BPN), virtual cards flow directly from issuers and AP aggregators into the lockbox, where automation takes over.
Patel described it succinctly: The lockbox “dynamically extracts all the necessary information and checks that payment against the supplier’s preset acceptance policy.” If the transaction complies, it is processed automatically and the remittance is posted, compliantly.
Digital lockboxes also normalize remittance data. Instead of reconciling thousands of fractured payment messages, suppliers receive structured, machine-readable information that supports automated cash application.
Flexible, Multirail and AI-Driven
Virtual cards themselves are evolving. Patel expects two areas to shift most dramatically: delivery and cost structure. On the cost side, Patel sees growing use of acceptance economics as a negotiation tool. Suppliers and buyers increasingly treat interchange not as a fixed rate but a variable lever within their commercial relationship.
On the delivery side, AP aggregators are pushing to abandon the traditional email model. Some want to send bulk virtual card files, daily or weekly batches rather than thousands of individual emails. Others are beginning to use AI agents to navigate supplier portals autonomously.
This is an early glimpse into an AI-mediated future of B2B payments, where the buyer’s software interacts directly with the supplier’s portal.
Yet even as virtual cards become more automated, the payments continue to diversify. The future is not about replacing one rail with another; it is about enabling a fluid, multirail environment where suppliers must be “always open” but not uniformly permissive.
And as Patel makes clear, payments are no longer the end of the customer journey. They are a strategic extension of it.
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/