05
Market and trends
4 min read · Chapter 5 of 8
Who holds the power
Power sits with whoever controls the payment date and the rail, usually a large buyer.
- Buyer CFO and treasury set terms, rail policy and supplier finance, earn rebates, float and discounts, and bear fraud losses.
- Procurement picks suppliers and can write card acceptance or a surcharge ban into the contract.
- AP rejects invoices, holds payments and makes suppliers use its portal.
- Business approvers are the bottleneck and get nothing for speed.
- Suppliers want to be paid on time, in full, cheaply, with remittance. Weak against big buyers and stronger when scarce, they pay the card fees, the finance discount and the cost of lateness.
- Banks sell treasury services, Positive Pay and card programs; their security procedures shift UCC 4A losses to the customer.
- Card issuers and networks set interchange and run enrollment campaigns.
- AP networks and hubs own the enrolled-supplier list and the payment status; ERP vendors decide who gets the "pay" button.
- E-invoice networks are weak in North America without a mandate.
- Standard setters and regulators (IRS, CRA, FASB, IASB, Nacha, the Fed, FINTRAC, the Bank of Canada) impose tax, disclosure and rail rules.
Large buyers dictate net 60 to 90 terms, portals, rails and supplier finance; small suppliers comply or lose the account. Only government buyers have legal caps on lateness. The pending Visa and Mastercard settlement (preliminary approval June 9, 2026, final approval pending) would let merchants accept or decline credit cards by category, commercial included, and surcharge more freely, per Visa's public filing. I think it would give suppliers a right to refuse commercial cards without much bargaining power to use it, since virtual card enrollment is negotiated supplier by supplier and the buyer's contract is still the real limit.
Tailwinds and headwinds
These are the forces I'd expect anyone in AP to watch over the next couple of years, and each one helps some players and hurts others. Cards show up on both sides, and whoever owns the ledger tends to come out ahead.
Tailwinds:
| What's changing | Who gains | Who loses |
|---|---|---|
| AP providers now earn most of their money from moving payments, and card payments to suppliers keep growing faster than AP itself. | Ramp, Corpay, BILL, WEX; Visa and Mastercard; buyers earning rebates | Suppliers, who pay the card fees; bank issuers losing share to fintech programs, such as U.S. Bank, whose corporate payments revenue was flat in 2025 |
| Banks, accounting software makers and spend platforms are folding bill pay, cards and expenses into one product, as when Capital One bought Brex. | Capital One, Intuit, SAP, Ramp, Corpay | Single-product AP tools and mid-size independents, which become takeover targets; buyers, once one vendor holds the ledger, the card and the payment |
| Fraud keeps rising, and since June 2026 the ACH rules make every business that sends ACH payments monitor its own supplier payments. | Banks that sell account validation and monitoring (JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America); AP networks with verified supplier records (Paymode, BILL, Corpay, AvidXchange); virtual cards, which fraudsters rarely target | Buyers with manual vendor-master changes and lots of checks; smaller AP tools without verification data |
| The Fed raised rates in September 2026, so cash held in transit and longer payment terms are worth more again. | Float earners (BILL, Corpay, Tipalti and the banks); supply chain finance and early-pay providers (C2FO, Taulia, Citi, JPMorgan Chase); buyers with strong credit | Suppliers, who wait longer and pay the finance discount; buyers without strong credit, which can't get bank supply chain finance |
| AI tools are taking over reading, coding and approving invoices, and are starting to make payments. | Whoever holds the ledger and invoice data (SAP, Coupa, Ramp, BILL, Intuit); Visa and Mastercard | Outsourced AP labor and per-invoice capture tools; buyers whose agent pays the wrong party, since Visa's rules make the cardholder responsible |
Headwinds:
| What's changing | Who gains | Who loses |
|---|---|---|
| The pending Visa and Mastercard settlement and a Senate bill could let suppliers refuse or surcharge business cards and push interchange down. | Suppliers; ACH and RTP (the banks, The Clearing House); American Express, which the bill exempts as a three-party network | Issuers and AP networks paid in interchange (Corpay, BILL, AvidXchange, WEX, U.S. Bank, Capital One, Ramp); Visa and Mastercard; buyers' rebates |
| Checks are still about a quarter of business payments, and the move to digital has stalled since 2019. | Banks' check, lockbox and Positive Pay businesses (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi); outsourced check printers that earn float | AP networks whose model is moving suppliers to card or ACH (BILL, AvidXchange, Corpay, Paymode, Tipalti); buyers, through check fraud |
| Accounting software makers now charge apps for data access and sell their own bill pay and cards. | Intuit, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft | Independent AP tools that sit on QuickBooks or Xero (BILL, Tipalti); their customers, through passed-on fees |
| AI makes fake invoices, receipts and voices cheap, and the buyer still carries the loss. | Banks and verification vendors; virtual cards | Buyers; AP tools selling touchless processing with wide tolerances; insurers |
| Free bill pay plans make it harder to charge small businesses a subscription. | Ramp, Intuit; small buyers | BILL's subscription line and Tipalti at the low end; suppliers, who end up paying through card fees |
The one thing I'd watch is the court's final decision on the Visa and Mastercard settlement, expected after a hearing reported for November 2026. It decides how much of the card growth in the first tailwind survives.