Billtrust and Visa to Continue Collaboration on Business Payments Network

Billtrust extended its collaboration with Visa, meaning Visa will continue to offer its financial institution clients access to Billtrust’s Business Payments Network (BPN).

The two companies teamed up to launch BPN in 2018, aiming to help financial institutions streamline the B2B digital payments process for their corporate clients, according to a Thursday (July 11) press release.

Today, the BPN infrastructure connects hundreds of suppliers and hundreds of thousands of buyers and facilitates the straight-through processing of billions of dollars’ worth of payments, Nick Izquierdo, executive vice president of payments at Billtrust, said in the release.

“Visa’s continued collaboration with Billtrust is a testament to our mutual belief in the power of BPN to expand the B2B payment ecosystem through continued ergonomic and economic support of virtual card acceptance, driving frictionless and more cost-efficient acceptance,” Izquierdo said.

BPN links suppliers to their buyers through connectivity to their preferred bank and payables providers, according to the release. By doing so, the network simplifies both payment acceptance via straight-through processing of virtual card payments and the capture of remittance data, the release said.

The solution allows suppliers to eliminate manual virtual card processing and optimize acceptance costs, lets buyers transact using their preferred payment method, and gives banks and accounts payable (AP) providers transparency regarding suppliers’ virtual card acceptance and preferences, per the release.

“We continue to be encouraged by BPN’s volume growth and potential, supporting our ability to offer it to clients,” Veronica Fernandez, senior vice president and North America head of Visa Commercial Solutions, said in the release.

When announcing the launch of BPN in 2018, Visa and Billtrust said the B2B payments platform aimed to streamline and digitize payments between businesses — and do it at scale.

BPN was designed to make it easier for businesses to get up and running with digital payments by eliminating complexities, such as the need for the buyer to know how the supplier likes to be paid, how to route that transaction once they do know, and how to make a payment that requires an email address, remittance data or a bank account number.

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