Customer experience: The critical differentiator in B2B payments

In the fast-evolving and high-stakes world of B2B digital payments – a market expected to grow more than 12-fold from around USD5 billion in 2024 to nearly USD60 billion by 2030 – customer experience has emerged as a crucial differentiator.

As businesses strive to provide seamless, quick and personalised payment services to increasingly discerning clients, the focus on customer experience has become central to ensuring customer satisfaction, building trust and loyalty, and establishing a competitive advantage.

Leaders at ANZ and Australian Payments Plus highlight the ways in which technological advancements, changing customer behaviour and expectations, and operational and regulatory considerations, are influencing payments infrastructure that will redefine the future of transaction banking.

The consumerisation of enterprise payments

Customer expectations are changing in line with a rapid rise in consumerisation and technological advances. Just as demand for enhanced user experiences has become commonplace in a retail setting – fueled by innovations such as apps powered by generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) – they are also growing in the world of enterprise payments.

This shift stems largely from the rapid adoption of technology in B2C transactions. This has led to faster innovation and more intuitive interfaces, such as mobile wallets, instant payments and real-time notifications, becoming more commonplace to benefit retail customers. Corporates, however, can find themselves constrained by legacy systems and regulatory hurdles, according to Venkatesh Subbaraman, Regional Chief Operating Officer, ANZ.

"Even as payment rails have been transforming to accommodate both domestic and cross-border real-time payments on the institutional side, the experience of the consumer banking client is far ahead with better experiences and better outcomes," he notes. "The reversal of innovation flow – from retail to institutional – is a major shift we’re working to address."

The challenge then for B2B payments is for service providers like ANZ to bridge the personal experience gap, and offer institutional clients the ease and speed that customers have come to enjoy in retail transactions. The good news, according to Anuj Mehra, Director, Strategic Sales & Platforms at ANZ, is that the gap is narrowing.

"There is an acceleration of the trend around consumerisation of the enterprise," he says. "because, there is now a greater level of realisation about the behaviours of the corporate client base (both large organisations and small businesses), and how their needs and wants have come to resemble that of a retail customer."

Leveraging behavioural science and technology

As consensus builds around the need to view the requirements of corporate customers with a retail lens to offer a greater level of personalised service, institutions like ANZ are turning to behavioural science, a field of study that has been successfully used to offer bespoke solutions to retail clients.

As Mohamed Khalil, Managing Director of ANZ Plus & Digital, notes, it is important to recognise that customers – even institutional ones – are not always purely rational actors. "We all have emotions, and those can play a big role in decisions," he explains. "What we want to do is provide a system that helps customers better balance their financial choices, offering behavioural feedback and real-time insights."

Tools like ANZ Plus, which have proven effective at helping retail customers track expenses by offering granular insights into their spending habits, can also help corporates, especially small businesses that may not have the resources of a large organisation to guide their financial decisions, Khalil says.

Rapid advances in areas like AI and natural language processing, as well as emerging capabilities like Agentic AI, will play a pivotal role in driving these efforts, according to Nigel Dobson, Banking Services Lead at ANZ. Equipped with the superior ability that these technologies offer to mine and analyse customer data, payments service providers can acquire a keener grasp of clients’ needs and implement a variety of sophisticated solutions that can better serve them.

Agentic AI, in particular, holds significant promise, as it can equip existing AI systems with a higher degree of autonomy make certain decisions and offer real-time, personalised customer interactions, which can delight the customer and drive efficiency across operations.

"You can transfer what would have otherwise been a human decision into the realm of an agent that's acting responsibly on behalf of you and the customer, move really rapidly through a process, and reliably fulfill those requirements time and time again," explains Dobson. "That's really what we'll see happen next."

Subbaraman elaborates that AI also plays a critical role in reducing customer effort and anxiety – two key pillars of customer experience. "Effort relates to how easy it is for a client to complete a transaction, while anxiety is about the uncertainty they feel during the process," he explains. "AI can help validate payment details, reduce errors and provide real-time notifications, all of which enhance trust and ease of use."

Indeed, AI is becoming a game-changer in enhancing customer experience, particularly in driving proactive engagement. By analysing customer behaviour to identify inconsistencies and inefficiencies, AI enables banks to offer tailored solutions that prevent problems before they occur. "A customer call is a defect," Subbaraman says. "It signals that something went wrong or was unclear. Our goal is to eliminate those calls by proactively addressing issues before they arise - using AI to predict needs and provide reassurance."

Asset tokenisation is another technology with the potential to revolutionise transaction banking and the corporate treasury. ANZ, for instance, has used tokenisation to create a solution that allows its customers in Australia to meet upcoming payday superannuation regulations that would mandate employers to pay their employees' super at the same time as their salary and wages. "It's a technology solution coupling real-time payments and asset tokenisation to ensure that we take the operational friction out of the process that exists today and deliver a compliant solution," Dobson says.

ANZ is also conducting various pilot programmes, including trialing predictive analytics and behaviour tracking tools, as well as agentic AI, which enable the bank to anticipate client needs, reduce service defects and improve operational efficiencies. ANZ’s 'digital backbone' further integrates client data across countries and products, helping the bank to offer personalised services that address specific needs and issues informed by client interactions.

Hyper-personalisation and networking the network

As service providers race to gain an edge over the competition by getting to know and serve their customers better, the transaction banking landscape could soon witness hyper-personalised services and interconnected ecosystems.

Subbaraman envisions a future where banks offer corporate clients 'hyper-institutionalised choices' to customise their interactions and the overall banking experience. This approach, he says, will require financial institutions to shift from a product-centric mindset to a customer-centric one, and listening to the client’s needs to deliver tailored solutions.

"We need to give clients the choice of how they want to deal with us," he says. "Too often, banks dictate the terms. But with the right technology, we can reverse that and offer clients a personalised, flexible experience that aligns with their operations."

Enabling such hyper-personalised services are ecosystems that embody ANZ’s 'networking the network' approach, which aims to integrate the bank’s global capabilities and regional know-how to provide clients with unified access to its products and services, regardless of geography. Such a strategy is especially effective in serving the changing needs of institutional clients’ treasury operations, such as the growing trend of regional treasury centers, explains Subbaraman.

"Our clients are consolidating their operations across regions, and we need to mirror that," he adds. "It’s not just about payments anymore – it’s about delivering a single, seamless view of the bank across geographies and products."

Real-time payments and transparency: the new standard

While technology is creating many avenues to impress and delight the customer, one of the biggest customer-centric innovations it has enabled is real-time payments, which are redefining the B2B payments customer experience.

As Katrina Stuart, Executive Sponsor of the Move to NPP at Australian Payments Plus, highlights, real-time payments offer significant opportunities for businesses to enhance customer interactions.

"The fact that you can get information in real-time that's associated with the payment means customer issues can be resolved there and then," she explains, adding: "Technology is making people expect immediate visibility into what is happening with their payments. It's like we have moved to the 'WhatsApp' of the payments world."

Offering this desired immediacy can not only improve customer experience but also help enhance the client’s operational efficiencies and cash flow management capabilities. Of course, the benefits of real-time payments are not limited to speed alone. Transparency and traceability are equally important for institutional clients as they help to keep a tab on when a payment reaches its destination, and minimise the need for follow-ups.

Real-time payment services are designed with these considerations in mind, enabling businesses to send and receive payments 24/7, streamline processes to make them more efficient, and optimise the treasury management function with a real-time view of cash positions.

Similarly, PayTo, a digital payment initiation solution, informs treasurers when they have been paid while allowing for automatic identification and matching of transactions. This so-called zero-effort reconciliation, together with built-in account validation features, helps reduce fraud and failed payments, and significantly reduces customer anxiety and enhances operational efficiency. Additionally, by embedding payments into business processes, PayTo helps optimise cash flows, reduce reconciliation efforts and create seamless customer experiences.

"PayTo can be used for a wide range of use cases, from payroll to superannuation, to collecting payments from customers," Stuart explains. "There is a real opportunity to reinvent customer experiences for businesses and corporates by incorporating and leveraging these payment capabilities."

ANZ’s Mehra agrees, noting: "Embeddedness will be more and more pronounced as we move forward. We will also see further advancements with new technology powering better customer experiences, whether it's through new payment types or new business models."

Challenges and opportunities ahead

Despite the many exciting possibilities, challenges remain. Real-time payments, for instance, work well within geographical borders but continue to face limitations when it comes to cross-border commerce due to fragmented regulatory frameworks and the lack of interoperability between payment systems in different countries.

While some progress has been made on this front, such as linking real-time payment systems between regional markets like ASEAN, achieving global interoperability will require substantive collaborative efforts from governments, regulators and financial institutions. Other hurdles include the understandable reluctance among corporates to replace functional legacy systems, resistance to change, and the "don’t fix what isn’t broke" mindset.

Yet, ANZ’s leaders are optimistic about the regulatory gaps being filled in due course and the power of technology and the network effect to help overcome these obstacles. Crucial to success, however, is the need to find the right service providers, notes Dobson. "You need a good partner, in terms of your bank and your technology provider, and they all need to be working together."

Obstacles notwithstanding, service providers and corporates are recognising the need to move fast because elevating the B2B customer experience is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a competitive necessity. The focus on customer experience will only continue to grow in prominence as a defining factor in gaining and retaining clients in an increasingly digital world. Fortunately, solutions are at hand in the form of tools like real-time payments, AI, behavioural science and asset tokenisation to help prepare for a future that is nearly here.

As Subbaraman says: "The ability to give the client what they want is a huge opportunity and it’s not far away. It’s already happening – another 18 to 24 months and we’ll be looking at a different landscape altogether."