Commercial Payments with Jessica Pinkston // Cornerstone Hot Takes

2023 is going to be a very exciting time in the payments space, especially on the commercial side. Lots of innovation coming up, lots of customers looking to see what they want to do from the bank side and from the fintech side in terms of payments.

In terms of trends for 2023, commercial payments are still experiencing that consumerization of the experience. We saw a lot of innovation over the past few years in consumer payments, P2P, enhanced bill pay, integrated e-bills, Zelle, for example.

From a consumer standpoint, we’re expecting that same look and feel, but translated to the high functions of commercial payments.

We started that slowly, just in terms of terminology. It used to be, if you were going to originate ACH as a commercial client, you had to understand what ACH meant. You had to understand if you were originating a debit file or originating a credit file and what that did.

Now we’re just telling commercial customers, “Do you want to send money, or do you want to get money?” We’re changing the way that we talk about it so that people can actually understand what they’re doing from a business need and a payment standpoint.

I know. It’s like this light-bulb moment in the industry as a whole.

Well, I think we forget sometimes that the people who do commercial things are actual consumers.

Exactly.

And so their expectations change, right?

That’s exactly what has happened. What we’ve seen recently is the consumers who are running the businesses are bringing their own consumer expectations to their commercial functionality.

It’s taken a little bit for the providers to catch up with that, but we really saw 2022 as the culmination of a lot of changes. Then we’re going to see new payment types, such as real-time payments and the increased impact of faster payments, added into that new experience in 2023.