An expert's guide to choosing the right corporate payment solution
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” — Bill Gates.
If you're unhappy with your corporate payment provider, choosing another isn’t always easy.
But the reality is that picking the right corporate payment provider will make a night and day difference. Too often, payment processes distract us from doing what we do best — but the best providers master the complexity for you, allowing more time for what matters most to you and your business.
What we're saying is, you need a corporate payment expert by your side who can give your more than you expect. And that's where we come in.
We're confident this guide will help you make the right decision by answering: How can we recognize excellent corporate payment and make the choice that provides the best value?
Today’s expectation of financial services
Today’s technological developments are enabling global connectivity while, at the same time, society is becoming more fragmented with people looking for like-mindedness in others who share the same values.
Companies want to find shared values just as much when looking for the right payment solution provider. One of those universal values is trust.
What role does trust play, and which other expectations do businesses and their customers have for the payment industry?
The orientation to trust
Trust is a crucial challenge and can’t be taken for granted. It takes years to build but only seconds to lose.
It's only in healthcare that trust is more important to consumers, [1] which points out how important it is for the financial services industry to be acknowledged as trustworthy.
And how is the finance industry handling the scrutiny? There's still a way to go, with only 54% of global consumers trusting financial services. [2]
For continuous trust-building, information quality and communication with transparency are two of the most powerful and fundamental factors for customers. [2]
On the other end, businesses lose trust quickly with bad customer service, low product quality, or involvement in scandals. [1]
Walking the digital finance path of data
As payment becomes more digital, unlocking payment data is faster and cheaper than ever — if you have the right partner. [7]
Banks, card providers, and fintech companies are working together to solve common challenges around transaction data, as well as customer and cash management, which can simplify and enhance the payment process for customers.
New offerings can be found in data-driven embedded finance — non-financial services connected to traditional banking products — such as products created to help small businesses run more efficiently.
The direction of corporate payment
With the financial sector stepping up its game to consistently build customer trust, expectations from consumers and corporate customers are also evolving at the same time.
Individuals and businesses now expect a high level of personalization and real-time service in all aspects of their lives.
In today’s hectic and digitizing world, payment has become more digital too. During the pandemic, cash use dropped between 10-50% across Europe. [3]
And there’s the consumerization trend, which shows a shift towards electronic transactions in the ecommerce arena. This causes business-to-business (B2B) buyers' expectations to move towards those of business-to-consumer (B2C) buyers.
58% of B2B buyers now make purchases to be delivered directly to their private home, accommodating an increasingly distributed and hybrid workforce. [4] The acquisition of new devices and software for home use means procurement spend is on the rise.
In fact, B2B ecommerce as a whole is growing fast and will continue to accelerate with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.2% through 2030. [5]
By 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between buyers and suppliers will occur on digital channels. [6]
Since B2B transactions tend to be larger and more complex than B2C purchases, expectations regarding payments revolve around simplicity and ease of use: simple online shopping experiences and multiple payment options.
At a crossroads: When to change payment provider
With so many offerings developing within diverse collaborations in the corporate payment world, where should you start? What factors should we focus on to make the right decision in a complex situation?
First off, a clear reason to change is if you've lost your trust. There are providers with fantastic customer retention and vast partner networks that you're better off relying on.
But what if your challenges are less obvious? Maybe your company (like many we know) has used workarounds for years but they're suddenly becoming less viable. These well-intentioned setups are hardly sustainable and eventually need expert intervention.
We're talking about the day-to-day payment processing operations that go on as usual but are costly and inefficient with the need to keep up with today’s digital developments.
A recent survey of ours shows that the biggest concern for companies is the need for better system integration. [8] This, above all, is what drives their switch to a primary corporate payment provider: the smart and simple experience of an optimized end-to-end payment process.
Security, reliability, and saving time and money are the top priorities of nearly every business. [8] The least you should ask for in your corporate payment are solutions that are automated, easy to use, and transparent to control.
And we're confident we can deliver more than you expect.
Why AirPlus?
Customers keep telling us that they count on AirPlus for security, trust, and reliability.
That's great, considering more people than ever from the B2B world are openly valuing the importance of customer service and experience. [9]
In fact, all of the most successful providers in terms of market share in our industry rank top for high quality, service, reliability, and security.
That’s what our customers get when they choose us as their corporate payment provider. And it's why they keep choosing us: We have a 97% customer retention rate, proof that we listen to our customers and fulfill their payment needs. The data tells us we outperform our competitors above all in personal communication and relationship management.
Our customers tell us AirPlus stands first and foremost for reliability, trust, transparency, and security and, as payment specialists, we are proud to keep setting their standards high.
More than 80% of our customers value us most for our market knowledge, industry expertise, trustworthiness, experience, and professionalism.
The fast track to data
At our heart, we're a data company. Our core promise is to deliver the highest quality data and solutions to our customers to meet any challenge in the rapidly digitalizing payment world.
Here’s how your business can benefit from AirPlus expertise:
- Our solutions unite the deepest data quality with the widest payment acceptance to run smoothly in the background of your payment processes and deliver across the full payment journey
- We are the #1 issuer of UATP, the 1st ever credit card system with the most outstanding data quality
- We are industry-leading with ~95% data quality completeness value and 99.7% reconciliation rate
- We apply cutting-edge technology with ultramodern, cloud-based, flexible, scalable, digital offerings integrated from end to end of the value chain
- We offer the most customizable invoices and e-billing in the industry thanks to the widest range of personalized data fields to tell you exactly what you need to know about your transaction data
- Our automated invoice reconciliation provides huge savings potential, ensures accurate capture of data, accelerates processes to a considerable degree, and simplifies the archiving of invoices.
Destination: end-to-end payment
All roads lead to your integrated system setup with AirPlus.
We serve our customers with intelligent integration solutions and can proudly say there’s never been a customer ecosystem we can’t integrate.
How do we do it?
- We perform dedicated research and investigation into your specific case
- Our agnostic system neutrality makes the interaction between you and your partners frictionless
- Outstanding technical know-how to connect your unique environment to our capabilities and build the necessary technical foundations to fit your ecosystem of partners
- Our active, thorough, and ongoing research and investigation bring the right players together to make sure your systems run to their full potential
- Our experts are committed to guiding you and your business through the full integration process — from beginning to end
We let the figures talk:
- 25+ years of data integration experience
- ~4,000 integrated partners and data sources
- Seamless integration into any ecosystem through close collaboration with 60+ IT partners to save processing costs and prevent errors
We strongly believe that we're the best match on the market for the values customers seek in a provider. Our valuable products, data, partner network, and customer service can be exactly what you need to forget about corporate payment and focus back on what matters to you and your business.
Learn more about us and our role in enabling payment process excellence!
Sources:
[1] WHY BRAND TRUST MATTERS IN FINANCIAL SERVICES, 2022 | Morning Consultant
[2] Trust Barometer, 2022 | Edelman
[3] Digital Payments in Europe Forecast, 2021 | PPRO
[4] State of Business Procurement report 2022 | Amazon Business
[5] Business-to-Business E-commerce Market Size Report, 2030 | grandviewresearch.com
[6] B2B Payments Trends to Digitize Your Business in 2022, 2022 | BigCommerce
[7] Why payments data is the key to unlocking new customer value | EY | 2021
[8] Image Survey for AirPlus 2022. Unpublished internal company document | Appinio
[9] AirPlus Customer Perception Study 2022. Internal AirPlus International report: unpublished | AirPlus International
