With a unique but sensible approach to identity infrastructure, PaymentWorks is bringing B2B payments into the 21st century. CEO Thayer Stewart said it’s long past time B2B payments got the attention long reserved for their consumer brethren.
With four decades in B2B payments, Stewart has seen firsthand how far B2B payments have fallen behind. Consumers have benefited from cards and many digital payment options, while B2B payments remain mired in paper checks, purchase orders, and time-consuming vendor creation and maintenance.
More than a decade ago, Stewart had a vision. Knowing every company maintained a vendor master database and believing it would eventually migrate to the cloud, what if he created a single database everyone could access? As commerce becomes more agentic and supply chains more fragmented, businesses will need proper identity infrastructure and ways to build trust in a virtual world.
Consumers are rapidly moving to a world where everything, from identity to finances to even medical records and digital signatures, is on their phone. Stewart sees the same future for B2B. During every transaction, including agentic ones, vendor information will be securely exposed so both sides can transact with confidence.
“The magic we’ve pulled off is we’ve proven to the world that you can create a standard ID wallet or profile to support business transactions,” Stewart said.
He added that payments and identity are two sides of the same coin. Likening it to Visa, Stewart said that while settlement processes are standard, the entire system, where businesses and consumers are confident in transacting in large cities and remote villages, runs on trust.
AI has accelerated fraud
This comes as AI enables criminals to conduct fraud at unprecedented scale. This has caused B2B fraud to explode. Stewart said B2B social engineering fraud is massive, with criminals tricking firms into changing banking and other information to pilfer millions at a time.
“On a dollar basis, it is, by far, the biggest source of cybercrime in the world,” Stewart said. “It’s kind of the biggest problem nobody wants to talk about.”
Banks distance themselves from it because the risk is too great. However, they are more than happy to recommend PaymentWorks to business customers. It is placed in front of ERP systems, with fraud indemnification from Chubb. PaymentWorks offers a $2 million guarantee on eligible domestic ACH payments made to vendors with its Payee Profile. More than 1.5 million businesses are covered in the company’s Vendor Identity Network; it processes north of $10 billion in monthly payments.
In a world where any customer friction better be meaningful, PaymentWorks is perfectly positioned at the onboarding stage, where parties expect to spend a bit of time. Now that information is captured once, and when it is accessed later, the time savings are noticeable.
PaymentWorks began by targeting specific verticals, reaching scale, and then adding new ones. Early sectors included large research universities, health care, and local and state government. Stewart said it’s common for 80% of an enrollee’s vendors to already be in the system.
He added that as institutions increasingly see onboarding as a value creation gateway, PaymentWorks can help support preferred payment adoption. With payments as a commodity, if they don’t add value, they risk losing share to fintechs and more progressive incumbents.
“If you can naturally insert yourself in front of the customer’s financial system when that vendor’s being set up for that first time, or they’re changing their information, that is the time you can influence payment decisions,” Stewart said. “It’s theoretically the payment operating system.”
Value is provided long after onboarding. Stewart estimates that half of vendors change some information every year. With companies having thousands of vendors each, that’s plenty of updating to do.
Stewart said the debate around an agentic trust layer in both consumer and B2B payments is the hottest industry topic. It pits probabilistic and deterministic solutions against each other. Probabilistic solutions build trust scores but struggle to reach the 100% success rate needed to support agentic commerce.
“To be an agentic trust layer, I think you have to provide institutional accountability,” Stewart said. “If someone is willing to say this is you guaranteed, and if it isn’t, they suffer financial consequences of up to $2 million…”