Green Sheet interviews SAP Taulia's Peddy Hashemi

Programmable payments, payment factories and digital currencies are no longer abstract concepts. They are reshaping how global businesses manage liquidity, strengthen supply chains and prepare for a real-time future. In this Q&A, Peddy Hashemi, global head of customer success at SAP Taulia, discusses how enterprises can harness programmable payments to ease supplier strain, the evolution of payment factories into strategic treasury hubs, and which technologies are most likely to drive near-term adoption.

Green Sheet: 1. How can programmable payments help resolve persistent supplier payment delays and ease global supply chain pressures?

Peddy Hashemi: In our 2024 global survey, conducted jointly with Mastercard, over two-thirds of respondents reported that late payments create significant cash flow challenges, making running a business difficult. For organizations receiving payments across multiple jurisdictions, where longer payment cycles are common, high fragmentation further compounds supply chain pressures.

Programmable payments provide a powerful and convenient solution. By automating transactions once predefined conditions are met, they streamline processes through a centralized system. Leveraging technologies such as smart contracts and blockchain, programmable payments reduce reliance on intermediaries, minimize approval delays and accelerate settlement.

This approach eliminates manual bottlenecks, reduces disputes and strengthens supplier confidence. For many of the global corporates we support, particularly those operating in fragile or complex supply chains, this reliability translates directly into greater resilience and business continuity.

GS: 2. What are "payment factories," and how are they reshaping multinational cash and payment management?

PH: Payment factories represent the first major step toward true payment automation. As centralized hubs for payment handling and monitoring, they not only streamline disbursements but also enable in-house banking capabilities and seamless integration between enterprise systems and multiple banking partners.

While payment factories have existed for many years, for many of our enterprise customers the model has matured significantly, shifting from a pure cost-efficiency initiative to a core element of strategic treasury management.

The modern payment factory serves as a central command center for liquidity management, fraud prevention, and real-time visibility of cash balances across subsidiaries. By standardizing multi-bank connectivity, payment factories reduce bank fragmentation and empower treasury and procurement teams to unlock working capital more effectively.

Underpinned by AI-driven intelligence, today's payment factories optimize automation, strengthen risk assessment, and deliver actionable insights to support faster, smarter decision-making.

GS: 3. Of AI, blockchain, stablecoins and CBDCs, which do you see as most viable for near-term adoption?

PH: This is a complex question. While AI is already widely deployable and has had a transformative impact on optimizing workflows, its influence does not directly resolve key pain points in payments, namely settlement speed and transaction trust.

CBDCs hold significant promise in shaping the future financial ecosystem, particularly in extending financial access to unbanked or underbanked populations in developing markets. That said, widespread impact will depend on overcoming regulatory, infrastructure and adoption challenges.

In my view, stablecoins appear the most viable for near-term adoption in automated payment workflows.

They are already demonstrating tangible value by offering price stability, cross-border efficiency, and near-instant settlement. For businesses, this translates into the ability to enable real-time automated payments and improve supply chain efficiency.

SAP's Digital Currency Hub exemplifies how this can be applied in practice, enabling companies to send and receive cross-border payments in digital currencies seamlessly. By connecting treasury and finance systems with blockchain and crypto asset service providers, it enables 24/7, instant, secure, global payments at much lower fees and bridges the gap between the core ERP and blockchain based payment rails.

Importantly, stablecoin transactions also incur relatively low fees compared with other next-generation payment methods, further strengthening their business case.

GS: 4. Beyond supplier financing, what new use cases for programmable payments show the most promise?

PH: The landscape for programmable payments is evolving rapidly, with several new use cases beginning to gain significant traction.

One particularly promising example is the integration of programmable payments with virtual cards governed by predefined rules. Virtual cards are already well established in B2B payments due to their ability to enhance control, mitigate fraud risk and simplify reconciliation.

By embedding conditional logic, such as shipment confirmation or volume thresholds, programmable payments extend the utility of virtual cards even further. This enables transactions to be executed automatically once specific business conditions are met.

Many of our customers are now embedding virtual cards into end-to-end automated workflows, making them a natural vehicle for programmable payments, delivering greater speed, control, and auditability for corporate treasury functions.

GS: 5. What should businesses do now to prepare for programmable payments while ensuring compliance and security?

PH: Preparing for programmable payments requires businesses to take proactive measures, with a focus on digitization and stronger payment controls.

Establishing a payment factory, combined with solutions that provide real-time transaction visibility, lays the foundation for adopting next-generation payment innovations while ensuring both scalability and governance.

By leveraging these technologies, businesses can achieve seamless compliance with evolving regulatory requirements, unlock cost-saving opportunities, and significantly reduce risk, paving the way for a smoother transition to programmable payments.

GS: 6. What lessons can global businesses take from Europe's instant payments growth, and how might it drive worldwide adoption?

PH: The key lesson from Europe's rapid expansion of instant payments is that strategic alignment, through clear regulation, shared infrastructure and industry collaboration, can accelerate adoption at scale.

Frameworks such as SEPA and TIPS have enabled cross-border settlement in seconds, while the European Payments Initiative is further enhancing efficiency, reducing risk and improving liquidity for businesses.

Looking ahead, by 2028 it is projected that over 32 percent of global transactions will be conducted via instant payments, e-money, or direct debit. [see www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/world-payments-report/]. The takeaway is clear: companies worldwide must act now to embed real-time payments into their operations or risk falling behind competitors who do.

Those who move early will be best positioned to capture efficiency gains, strengthen liquidity management, and secure a competitive edge.

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