Stablecoins in B2B payments

Stablecoins are the future of payments. It's that simple. This type of asset solves many of the problems that the legacy system has, especially when it comes to cross-border payments and even more so in places where the financial system is less developed and a lot of people can't do international transactions or don't have access to a bank account at all.

SpaceX is an example of a successful implementation of stablecoins as a payment method in underdeveloped countries.

Even traditional finance players can see that and are making sure they grab a piece of that pie. Visa, for example, partnered up with Kast to deliver an easy and smart solution for payments using stablecoins.

Other companies are doing the same and stablecoins are rapidly becoming a central aspect of payments, at least for B2C (business-to-consumer) use cases.

The B2B gap

Business-to-business payment is a whole new universe compared to B2C and it's a market that's currently underserved by stablecoin solution providers.

That happens because most of those solutions focus on transaction efficiency, reduced fees and facilitated cross-border payments. While those are all very important factors for B2C payments, in the B2B world, that's the "easy" part.

B2B is much more about workflows than the payment itself.

I'm a project manager for a tech company, and coincidentally, I'm currently working on redesigning the B2B solution for a huge client. This project doesn't involve stablecoins or crypto in any form but it's been a great example of the complexity of business-to-business payments.

Here is a quick overview of the main pain points and obstacles.

High volume of items per order

The typical B2B chart is much larger than a B2C one. That may seem like a small detail but it actually matters a lot. Orders flow to and from multiple different systems during the full B2B process, and the more items in an order, the higher the chance of errors occurring in these integrations.

In fact, in this project I'm in, we discovered that one of the systems simply couldn't handle orders with more than 150 items - which is not rare in this context - and therefore, we had to implement a workaround for that.

Multiple business rules

The client I'm working with is a huge brand that also has a lot of other brands under its umbrella, which means they have a LOT of different business rules that are specific for each of the brands. All systems in the payment workflow must be able to identify and process these different rules.

Client-specific custom conditions

In a B2B context it's very common to have specific contract conditions for each client, which is something that doesn't really happen in B2C. Sure, you may have promotions, discount coupons and things like that, but those are all based on a predefined set of rules that you can apply to some or all of your customers.

For B2B, companies often negotiate contracts individually with their clients, which creates unique contracts with different types of discounts, payment conditions, delivery options and whatnot. That must all be taken into consideration by the workflows involved in the system.

These points represent only part of the added complexity of B2B context but they are enough to illustrate the point.

The way forward

The B2B market represents a trillion-dollar opportunity but to unlock that, solution providers must focus on what really matters: workflows.

Sure, transaction efficiency, reduced fees and easy cross-border payments are also significant in the B2B context, but it's not really where the pain is.

Current stablecoin platforms must understand this context and develop workflow-oriented solutions that leverage the advantages of cryptocurrency and also take into account the business and technical complexity of B2B processes either by developing these additional features themselves or by partnering with other companies that possess that expertise.

Final thoughts

Stablecoins are rapidly growing to become one of the main payment methods in the B2C world. However, for B2B, there are many more challenges that must be addressed, which are not related to payment itself but to workflows.

Solution providers must understand the challenges of the B2B context and develop products and services that are workflow-oriented. It's a lot of work, but the reward may well be worth it.

Posted Using INLEO