Almost 90 percent of corporates believe that moving vendor payments from check to electronic will have a very high or high impact on their businesses within the next three years, a BNY Mellon survey has found.
The survey, entitled "The Future of Payments–A Corporate Perspective", focuses on the needs, pain points, and priorities of corporates.
It also explores corporate attitudes toward the wave of new technologies that have impacted payments so far and their thinking around the adoption of those technologies in the future.
Concerns about security, payment information, ease of execution, and cost feature as some of the top five areas for payment improvement cited by survey respondents.
More than half (54 percent) of respondents suggested that payment reliability needs the most improvement when thinking about the future of payments.
Nearly 70 percent of survey respondents said that real-time payments will have a high or very high impact on their businesses within the next four or more years.
Almost two-thirds (64 percent) of respondents believe that tokenised payments solutions such as BNY Mellon's implementation of Disbursements With Zelle will have an impact on their company in four years, with almost half (43 percent) stating that they would be ready in that time frame.
Some 49 percent said they are ready to implement SWIFT's global payments innovation initiative for cross-border payments, either now or within the next three years.
Nearly 80 percent of respondents cited reducing risk as the top benefit of new payment initiatives that might impact their companies over the next decade.
Reduced internal costs were a significant benefit of new payment initiatives for 65 percent of respondents.
Availability of IT resources is cited as the biggest challenge in achieving an ideal future payment experience by almost 70 percent of respondents.
They see increased technology resources as the most imperative strategic need to implement new payment solutions.
Jeff Horowitz, managing director, market head for relationship management, corporate, government and not-for-profit segments at BNY Mellon treasury services, and an author of the paper said: “the question for corporates has quickly evolved from what needs to change, to how much and how quickly that change can happen”.
He added: "People are now looking for greater understanding around which improvements will best meet their unique payment requirements, and are asking about the feasibility of applying those changes to their complex operations smoothly."
Co-author, Carl Slabicki, director, product line manager for immediate payments at BNY Mellon treasury services, commented: "Corporates are moving into the new frontier, and we as payment providers are helping guide the way towards change.”
He added: “Payment technologies such as application programming interface, robotics, artificial intelligence, and blockchain/distributed ledger are promising further efficiencies, streamlined capabilities, and cost savings that aim to speed payment operations."
