BNY Mellon Research Finds Corporate Payments Firmly Planted in Physical and Digital Worlds

BNY Mellon has released its latest whitepaper on trends in the payment space. ‘The Future of Payments-A Corporate Perspective’ focuses on the needs, pain points, and priorities of corporates, their attitudes toward the wave of new technologies that have impacted payments so far, and their thinking around adoption of those technologies in the future.

The whitepaper finds that corporates have shifted from learning and exploring what is possible with payments to making concrete plans for what, when, and how to implement. Entire corporate industry segments realise that now is the time to address the many pain points in payments that their industries have been encountering for decades. New offerings such as instant and tokenised payments are coming to the forefront. At the same time, incumbent paper-based solutions such as cheques and lockbox services remain firmly in place.

In support of its insights on the current state of payments and the likely trends coming into place, BNY Mellon conducted a survey along with in-depth interviews of corporates to understand and quantify their thinking and concerns. Key findings include:

  • More than half (54%) of respondents believe payment reliability needs the most improvement when thinking about the future of payments. Concerns about security, payment information, ease of execution, and cost round out the top five areas for payment improvement cited by survey respondents.
  • Almost 90% of corporates believe that moving vendor payments from cheque to electronic will have a very high or high impact on their businesses within the next three years. At the same time, lockbox solutions continue to hold a solid place for practitioners with customer bases that still pay primarily by cheque today, and appear as if they will continue to do so into the near future.
  • Nearly 70% of survey respondents believe 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%) of respondents believe that tokenised payments solutions will have an impact on their company in four years, with almost half (43%) stating that they would be ready in that time frame.
  • Nearly half of survey respondents (49%) felt they are ready to implement SWIFT’s gpi initiative for cross-border payments, either now or within the next three years.
  • Nearly 80% 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% of respondents.
  • Availability of IT resources is cited as the biggest challenge in achieving an ideal future payment experience by almost 70% of respondents. They see increased technology resources as the most imperative strategic need to implement new payment solutions.