Complete the form to unlock this article and enjoy unlimited free access to all PYMNTS content — no additional logins required.

Moving money used to be the product. Today, it’s becoming a commodity.

“Execution itself is becoming commoditized. The durable value sits in the quality of the decision and the intelligence behind it,” Tungsten Automation Chief Product Officer Danielle Weinblatt told PYMNTS for the B2B Payments 2026 event, “The B2B Payments Agentic Enterprise: Trusted Data Comes Before AI Payment Decisions.”

As accounts payable software absorbs more of the information surrounding a transaction, from invoice data and purchase orders to supplier preferences, discount windows and working capital constraints, the competitive battleground in B2B payments is shifting upstream.

“Today, capture of the invoice, compliance rules, connectivity, execution of the payment, they usually live in different systems, so the context will die at the handoff,” Weinblatt said, adding that the problem is that each handoff can strip away context.

The important question for today’s chief financial officers is becoming less whether a platform can execute a payment than whether it knows enough about the transaction to determine how and when that payment should happen.

“You stop merely executing a transfer and start making a decision,” Weinblatt said. “The right rail, the right timing, the right controls.”

Across today’s solutions, the payment layer can inherit the negotiated terms on an invoice, the available discount window, verified banking details, supplier payment preferences, approval history and outstanding disputes. Instead of simply receiving an instruction to send $50,000 to a bank account, the system can determine whether that $50,000 should move today, next week or through a different payment rail altogether.

Source link