Ardent’s P2P Technology Round-Up returns today with another assortment of ePayables, procure-to-pay (P2P), and B2B payment solution provider news and updates from the past week. If you are an Accounts Payable (AP), B2B payments, or spend management solution provider and you have news to share with us, please drop us a note at editor at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!
MasterCard Looking into Blockchain for B2B Payments
In recent news, Ardent Partners has learned that payments giant, MasterCard has filed a number of blockchain patent applications aimed at tracking consumer payments. MasterCard’s research and development wing is looking more closely into the implications of Blockchain to increase general efficiencies within the firm. The company describes the Blockchain distributed ledger technology as ideal for recording point-to-point transactions as they get processed. A major benefit to using the technology will be the ability to streamline account management by simplifying the process which registers and monitors purchase orders. Data can be stored clearly and in a format that is easily auditable by participating entities, so this would also simplify the process of monitoring purchases on multi-service platforms. The ability to provide immutable data records is a huge draw for MasterCard. That along with the news that MasterCard has been hiring Blockchain specialists, means the company is looking to utilize the technology more heavily moving forward.
Nexonia Launches Travel Booking Solution
Nexonia, a cloud-based web and mobile expense management solution with headquarters in Toronto, this week announced the launch of Nexonia Travel, an integrated travel and expense management solution. Nexonia Travel is the first major product launch since for the company since it was acquired by Certify, an expense management software provider, with headquarters in Portland, Maine. Certify also acquired corporate travel booking technology from nuTravel, which has formed the basis for Nexonia Travel. The new solution will allow business travelers and managers to make travel booking arrangements while still being compliant with their organization’s travel policies. Travelers will receive alerts over email and on their mobile devices if they try to book something inconsistent with corporate travel guidelines. Nexonia Travel has also been integrated with Nexonia Expenses, which will provide greater visibility into all T&E spending.
Certify Acquires Captio to Increase International Presence
Certify has also been in the news more recently with the announcement of its acquisition of Captio, a European corporate travel management platform provider based out of Spain. The deal represents Certify’s first acquisition outside of North America, and will allow Ceritfy to offer its expense management products for large and SMB customers throughout Europe. Captio, which was founded in 2012, offers an end to end cloud-based expanse management platform with mobile capabilities, and the ability to comply with specific country-based tax requirements. Captio has a strong customer base in Europe, and more specifically in Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy. The combined company will now have over 10,000 customers in 90 different countries. The purchase of Captio, is the latest move by Certify in an effort to grow its presence outside of North America. Certify has recently started a partnership with UK-based Sage Software to provide product integrations to shared customers. Certify has also integrated with Western Union to provide international payment capabilities to customers with operations outside the US.
BankiFi Launches New Business Banking Solution
BankiFi, a provider of a multi-bank aggregator platform, and operates out of the UK and the Netherlands, has recently launched a new solution to support the needs of business banking customers. The new PocketCollector solution is available as a standalone service or as part of Bankifi’s consent driven multi-bank aggregator platform. BankiFi concentrates on bringing value to banks by offering its business customers solutions such as the issuing of invoices and collection of payments. PocketCollector offers banks the ability to service their business customers with a Request to Pay service. Businesses benefit in terms of time and cost savings from a straight through process from invoice generation to sending to reminder, payment, collection and reconciliation. This is all automatically integrated with their accounting package or ERP system. This will allow for better communication between buyers and sellers as well. The PocketCollector service based model allows banks to benefit from open banking as business customers will be able to digitize information exchanged with their customers using mobile banking.
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