“The pace of change in the payments industry is impressive, and there’s nothing to suggest that it will slow down in 2024.” That quote from Swift’s Francois Maigre sets up the 2024 Business Payments Outlook nicely. To prepare this year’s Outlook, we asked Francois, Visa’s Alan Koenigsberg, Corporate Treasury 101’s Guillaume Jovencel, Zander’s Mark Sutton, Lipis Advisors’ Leo Lipis, ACT’s Naresh Aggarwal, AFP’s Tom Hunt, and IOFM’s Mark Brousseau to share their expectations of the year ahead.
The resulting collection of observations covers everything from the future of accounts payable, to the direction of cross-border and real-time payments and the role of financial messaging therein. And, as corporate treasury functions reach new levels of sophistication, our colleagues from across the ecosystem look at the ongoing role of automation and digitisation and the increasing roles of artificial intelligence (AI) and embedded finance to support working capital optimisation.
To the collection, we’ve added the observations of our own business payments experts through a series of interviews on The Payments Podcast. Kevin Pettet thinks beyond the basics in business digital banking to banks’ quest to achieve primacy across multibank relationships. Colin Swain and Jeff Feuerstein discuss the importance of cash flow management and the AI factor across global corporate payments. Frederic Viard and Edward Ireland talk about the regulatory landscape that will shape how the world’s banks talk with each other and their customers. Ruud Grotens warns us to be vigilant about the reality of mitigating insider threats as the business payments landscape evolves. Kellie White observes the ever-present role of user experience across the universe of business payments, as our expectations as businesspeople align with our sensibilities as consumers.