Part of the Ardent Partners team made it to Vegas this week for the Coupa Inspire conference. You can expect another article or two covering the briefings, presentations, and conversations that we participated in this week. Anyway, I wanted to start off our coverage by discussing an announcement made on Monday that focuses on B2B Payments. We’ll start with a quick preview of the announcement and then I’ll add some thoughts at the end.
Coupa and Bottomline Partner on B2B Payments
Coupa and Bottomline Partner on Payment In today’s digital marketplace, enterprises want payment methods that are automated, efficient, and secure. For Coupa Pay customers, a new strategic partnership between Bottomline and Coupa optimizes and streamlines digital payment processes. News of the partnership was announced opening day (April 22) of the Coupa Inspire Americas 2024 conference in Las Vegas. Bottomline, a global leader in business payments, enables Coupa Pay customers to connect to its Paymode-X business payments network and access Premium ACH for automated payments from buyers to suppliers.
Premium ACH complements Coupa Pay’s single business payment platform by further optimizing its payment stack, enhancing payment security, and receiving more payment rebates while improving the overall source-to-pay experience. Working with a leader in the source-to-pay (S2P) arena provides Bottomline with modernized and digitized payment processes between buyers and suppliers. The integration of Paymode-X with Coupa Pay simplifies buyer and supplier payments, while also unlocking more value for Coupa customers by paying suppliers using Premium ACH.
Similarly, suppliers also benefit from Premium ACH’s powerful extension of the Coupa platform by receiving enhanced data and reconciliation information, along with rich reporting and the potential to lower the cost of payment acceptance. The automation of the entire payment lifecycle using Bottomline’s secure payments network also strengthens supplier relationships and generates greater data transparency for all users.
Bottomline stated that the partnership with Coupa is the first launched through its network-as-a-service solution, announced last October. Coupa Pay customers now have access to Paymode-X network’s 550,000+ authenticated suppliers and the network’s proprietary Premium ACH payment type.
Ardent’s Instant Analysis
These two companies were both taken private within the last two years by private equity firm, Thoma Bravo (see our coverage of the Coupa announcement here and the Bottomline announcement here). When the Coupa deal was announced, I wrote that “it will be interesting to see if the new owner can execute on the compelling synergies that exist between these two companies.” This deal does exactly that.
Coupa Pay customers will now be able to connect instantly to any of their suppliers already on the Paymode-X network and deliver Premium ACH payments at no cost (to the buyer). These users can also ask their suppliers to join the Paymode-X network and use its Premium ACH service as another electronic payment method. The Paymode-X service offers buyer volume-based rebates, a higher level of supporting remittance information, and powerful anti-fraud capabilities, among other benefits.
Users should understand the availability and scale of rebates that can be generated as well as any supplier fees associated with their transactions. And while there are fees, they are generally lower than card-based payments. It is also reasonable to assume that most active suppliers on the Paymode-X network will be open to receiving payments on that platform. And in the instances where a supplier was being paid by virtual card, there could be a compelling financial benefit for that supplier to switch to the Paymode-X platform. The Bottomline team at the event said that getting access to this new payment method takes about an hour and that there are no fees to turn this capability on for any Coupa customer. The Bottomline team also indicated that there was strong interest and that a number of Inspire attendees had already registered for the service.
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