The Green Sheet Online Edition
October 13, 2025 • 25:10:01
How GenAI is accelerating the evolution of B2B payments
Generative AI (GenAI) has evolved from industry buzzword to business imperative across sectors, and B2B payments is no exception. While consumer payments experienced a digital revolution over the past decade, B2B transactions remained trapped in legacy workflows, manual processes and outdated systems.
Today, GenAI is emerging as the catalyst that will modernize B2B payments, streamlining accounts payable and receivable operations while enabling sophisticated risk management and fraud detection capabilities.
The B2B modernization challenge
B2B finance is a battlefield of complexity involving fragmented data, multi-layered approvals and relentless regulatory change. GenAI gives us the tactical advantage: systems that learn, reason and resolve friction before it even surfaces. The era of reactive operations is over; we're building predictive, self-healing payment networks.
The traditional solution—adding more human resources—is no longer viable. Research from Manhattan Venture Partners revealed that manual payment processing takes 67 percent longer than automated solutions, highlighting the urgent need for digital transformation (see bit.ly/48EOFze).
However, as we embrace GenAI's potential, we must recognize that it builds upon, rather than replaces, existing proven technologies. Blockchain, robotic process automation (RPA), and straight-through processing (STP) systems already address many challenges that GenAI is expected to solve, including reducing transaction friction, strengthening security protocols and streamlining reconciliation processes. The key insight is viewing GenAI not as revolutionary replacement technology, but as intelligent analytics and insights layers that optimize existing robust infrastructure. In the high-stakes, heavily regulated B2B payments environment, proper oversight and thoughtful guardrails remain essential regardless of the underlying technology stack.
GenAI's transformative potential
GenAI's true value lies in transforming rigid, reactive payment systems into dynamic, intelligent platforms. Unlike traditional rule-based systems, GenAI introduces contextual understanding, nuanced decision-making and predictive capabilities to an industry historically dependent on fixed parameters and predetermined responses.This technology enables sophisticated real-time decision-making, deeper behavioral analytics, and adaptive fraud detection systems that evolve alongside emerging threats. For innovation-focused companies, GenAI represents a powerful accelerator that amplifies existing capabilities and unlocks new possibilities for intelligent automation within established, reliable infrastructures.
Five key areas of impact
As generative AI reshapes financial operations, its impact can be seen across multiple dimensions of payments and treasury management, with five areas standing out in particular:
- Eliminating manual processes and reducing friction: GenAI's most immediate impact targets traditionally manual tasks like invoice processing, payment matching and data reconciliation. These processes have long been time-consuming, error-prone and costly bottlenecks in B2B workflows.
Through machine learning and natural language processing, GenAI handles high volumes of unstructured data, extracts relevant information, and completes reconciliation tasks with remarkable speed and accuracy. AI-powered invoice processing tools automatically capture and interpret details from various formats, such as PDFs, scans and emails, and match them against purchase orders and payment records in ERP systems.
This advancement in data parsing represents a significant breakthrough. While traditional STP platforms efficiently handle billions in payment volume, GenAI addresses complex edge cases that fall outside standard processing parameters, accelerating payment cycles while improving accuracy and compliance.
- Optimizing cash flow through predictive intelligence: Cash flow management becomes strategic with GenAI's predictive capabilities. By analyzing historical payment data and behavioral trends, GenAI models forecast when payments will likely be received or delayed, enabling proactive working capital and liquidity management.
In accounts receivable, GenAI analyzes customer payment patterns to prioritize outreach for accounts at risk of delinquency. For accounts payable, businesses leverage GenAI to optimize payment timing, balancing early payment discounts against cash flow constraints. This predictive intelligence empowers finance teams to make data-driven decisions that enhance both operational efficiency and strategic agility.
- Real-time fraud detection and prevention: Fraud poses growing threats in digital payments, with B2B transactions particularly vulnerable due to higher values and multiple intermediaries. Traditional rule-based detection systems struggle against evolving threats, but GenAI continuously learns from transactional behavior to flag anomalies in real time.
GenAI algorithms identify patterns deviating from normal behavior—unusual transaction sizes, unexpected timing or changes in vendor banking information, for example—providing dynamic protection that adapts to new fraud techniques.
- Intelligent payment routing and decisioning: GenAI transforms payment routing in today's complex B2B landscape, where businesses navigate multiple payment rails—including ACH, virtual cards, wires and real-time payments—and diverse supplier settlement preferences.
To recommend or automatically execute the most efficient payment method for each transaction, GenAI evaluates multiple criteria, such as cost, speed, supplier preferences and historical success rates, in real time This automation reduces costs while improving vendor satisfaction by aligning payments with their expectations.
- Building scalable innovation infrastructure: GenAI's long-term value lies in supporting scalable, intelligent automation that complements existing infrastructure while opening new innovation pathways. As businesses globalize and digitize, they need payment systems that are flexible, adaptive and capable of learning from data.
GenAI and STP technologies serve as connective tissue, bringing together disparate systems, harmonizing data, and facilitating real-time decision-making at scale.
The road ahead
The B2B payments industry is entering an intelligence-driven era defined by speed, automation and adaptive capabilities. By thoughtfully embracing GenAI as an enhancement to proven technologies, businesses can eliminate friction, strengthen security, optimize cash flow and build more resilient financial operations.
The future of B2B payments is undeniably smarter. With responsible adoption and strategic implementation, that future is within immediate reach for forward-thinking organizations ready to build upon their existing technological foundations. 
Rinku Sharma, chief technology officer at Boost Payment Solutions, is an accomplished senior technology leader and AI evangelist with over 23 years of experience driving transformational initiatives across diverse industries, including financial services and media. Contact him via LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/rinku-sharma17.
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