Webinar: How Payment Orchestration Reshapes Fintech Growth

A payment may look like the final step in a business process, but it is often where some of the most important financial decisions are made. When should a company pay? Which payment method should it use? How can it manage liquidity, reconcile the transaction and keep suppliers informed?

As commercial payments become more complex, businesses are looking beyond the transaction itself. They are embedding payment capabilities into the software and workflows where those decisions already happen – and using data and AI to make the process more intelligent.

This was the focus of a Visa and Transcard webinar hosted by Tom Chapman, Managing Editor at BizClik. 

From Transactions to Workflows: The Next Era of Intelligent Commercial Payments featured Cher Keck, Head of B2B Fintech Partnerships for North America at Visa Commercial Solutions, and Greg Bloh, CEO of Transcard, who explored how payment orchestration, workflow intelligence and AI can help financial services providers and enterprise platforms create value beyond the transaction, while improving visibility and working capital decisions.

You can watch the webinar on demand here.

Moving beyond embedded payments

Embedded payments have made it possible to initiate transactions inside enterprise software, platforms and systems of record. However, the speakers argued that the payment itself is only one part of a much more complex commercial process.

A B2B transaction can involve invoice approval, payment-method selection, liquidity management, bank connectivity, reconciliation, documentation and communication between buyers and suppliers. These activities often take place across multiple systems, with information transferred through manual processes or batch files.

Payment orchestration aims to connect those elements into a single, end-to-end workflow.

Greg illustrated the challenge through the freight and logistics sector. A freight forwarder may need to book cargo, decide whether to prepay or use business terms, provide a guarantee before goods are released and settle an invoice that changes during the shipping process because of additional charges.

In that context, an embedded payment button cannot address the full commercial requirement. Orchestration can coordinate the payment with the documents, data, approvals and decisions needed before and after the transaction.

"Embedded payments is a piece of it," Greg said. "Orchestration is the broad end-to-end view of it."

Creating value where decisions happen

For Cher, however, the strategic opportunity is to become part of the workflow where financial decisions are made.

She challenged businesses to ask: "When your clients grow, do you grow with them?"

She argued that "every client interaction creates opportunities beyond that transaction itself" and warned that, if a competitor "embedded financial services directly into your client's work flow," organisations should consider how quickly they could be displaced.

Those workflows, she said, include "approving those invoices and deciding when and how to pay, collecting those funds during reconciliation activity, managing liquidity, and interacting with suppliers and customers".

Cher added that customers do not want "fragmented payment portals, separate reconciliation processes or even disconnected experiences". Instead, when financial services are embedded "directly into systems and workflows clients already use", those experiences become "more convenient, more valuable, and often more difficult to replace".

AI adds workflow intelligence

Throughout the webinar, AI was presented as a way to support decision-making across the payment workflow, rather than simply automate isolated tasks.

Greg said AI becomes valuable when it has context about the wider transaction, including "what are balances, what is the liquidity situation" and other information available throughout the workflow. 

That context, he says, enables AI to "help make recommendations for what to do next or what the outcomes could be".

He identified accounts payable as one practical use case. When an AP employee has to search across multiple systems to gather information and reach a recommendation, AI can "gather that information a lot quicker and also present a recommendation". 

This does not remove the employee from the process – instead, it reduces the time required to reach a decision.

Cher added that AI should support businesses in making "more informed decisions, during and after the payment," rather than simply automating more activity. However, she stressed that this depends on the underlying workflow data being "connected and structured and useful".

One of the main pillars that will be central to adoption is governance. 

Greg said AI should be trained against an organisation’s policies and procedures, monitored and audited like an employee. In the webinar’s concluding Q&A, he said the model being discussed involved AI providing "recommendations, insights for a human to approve", with each organisation deciding what controls and levels of human intervention were appropriate.

You can watch the webinar on demand here.