Visa & SAP team up to make enterprise payments more efficient

Visa has announced it has entered into a cooperative endeavor with SAP to streamline and simplify business-to-business (B2B) payments for enterprises, from small to large, to government agencies and non-profit organizations.

The cooperation marks the first time Visa and SAP have joined forces to bring an innovation to life to embed payments into the SAP ecosystem through the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).

Around 99 per cent of the world’s largest companies are SAP customers. This cooperation sets the stage for Visa and SAP to explore embedded finance in the B2B market, helping integrate a financial journey into business operations. Visa estimates that opportunities to digitize B2B payment flows today represent more than $50 trillion across the Asia-Pacific.

For Visa, the move is in line with its strategy to increase its footprint in the B2B space, supporting broader money movement flows between individuals, businesses, and governments, beyond consumer payments. This includes accounts receivable and payable flows, corporate payments with card-based solutions, and cross-border payments.

“The movement of money is becoming increasingly digital, but the bulk of transformation has been focused on the consumer space,” said Mr. Stephen Karpin, Regional President of Asia Pacific at Visa.

“There is an urgent need to modernize the way enterprises pay and enhance the B2B payment experience. Our cooperation with SAP is an exciting step in making B2B payments simpler and more intuitive, as organizations can make payments immediately on SAP platforms with their Visa corporate cards, instead of having to leave their existing enterprise ecosystem and navigate the different payment methods that their vendors accept. B2B payments need to be intuitive, speedy, and fuss-free, so that organizations can spend time and resources on other aspects of their business.”

For SAP, this move is meant to enhance its customer experience in using SAP’s software to run their businesses. Running on SAP BTP, B2B payment services will offer convenient Visa payment services to SAP customers. Injecting more automation into payments - which marks the last mile of procurement - will help enterprises drive further efficiency in their purchasing journey as they make payments securely with just a few clicks.

“Our cooperation with Visa is to streamline and simplify the B2B payment process and drive further efficiencies for our joint customers,” said Mr. Paul Marriott, President of SAP Asia Pacific Japan. “Embedding Visa payments into the SAP ecosystem aims to scale and accelerate digital commerce, together empowering enterprises, from small businesses to government agencies and non-profit organizations, to make secure payments with just a few clicks, transforming the last mile of procurement.”

The embedded finance solution will be offered initially to SAP customers in Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, with plans to roll it out across other markets in the region.

The SAP BTP is an innovation platform optimized for SAP applications in the cloud that brings together application development and automation, data and analytics, integration, and AI capabilities into one unified environment.

Through this new cooperation, Visa and SAP will help bridge working capital gaps in the supply chain. Under its suite of Commercial & Money Movement Solutions, Visa will deliver capabilities through SAP BTP to route commercial payments to all suppliers, whether they accept card payments or not. This solution will help businesses who are Visa cardholders make payments seamlessly and utilize their cardholder benefits, be it domestically or cross-border.

The cooperation will also help to further digitize and speed up B2B payments across Asia-Pacific’s supply chains. Many businesses in the Asia-Pacific, especially smaller ones that tend to lack the resources to digitalize B2B payment acceptance, do not yet accept commercial card payments.

It can be challenging for card-enabled businesses to pay digitally as they resort to traditional, manual and time-consuming payment methods such as cash and cheques. It also affects the cash flow for both payers and suppliers as transactions via traditional payment methods tend to take a longer time to process and complete.