News

Frequent visitors to Payables Place will know that the complex category of business travel has increasingly become a bigger line-item at the average enterprise. In fact, the current business travel industry has not seen this level of growth since long before the economic downturn of last decade. As we move into a new year, what [...]

The wheels of business never stop turning. In payables news this week, we see the Federal Reserve Bank gaining record profits—mostly due to its bond buybacks over the past seven years, along with business travel on the rise and SWIFT deciding to upgrade its service that allows financial teams to comply better with international sanctions. [...]

Not even two full weeks have passed in 2015, and already big news has arisen around the accounts payable and working capital worlds. From the Federal Reserve declaring they wouldn’t yet raise interest rates in the U.S., to Russia finding itself forced to seek out alternatives to Visa and MasterCard. It’s looking like this year [...]

Today marks the end of the first full week of 2015, and the second week that Payables Place has posted every weekday. We’re planning to keep this schedule going, so make sure to check back every weekday for fresh news and research articles from the Ardent Partners team. That bit of self-promotion aside, we’ve covered [...]

[Editor’s Note: Today, the second day of 2015, we wrap up our best of 2014 series with our look at the U.S. government’s SupplierPay pledge, which originally appeared on August 25.] On July 11, President Obama announced the SupplierPay pledge. Based on the federal government’s QuickPay initiative, which is designed to pay small federal suppliers more quickly, the [...]

Today occupies an interesting place in modern culture. Boxing Day, as today is called in many nations of the former British Empire, is a secular holiday when servants and tradespeople would receive what’s called a “Christmas box” from their bosses or employers. No one quite knows the origin of the holiday’s name, but the tradition itself dates [...]

We’re two days away from Christmas, but that doesn’t mean the speed of business slows down. The accounts payable world last week enjoyed several new developments, as you’ll see below. The European Parliament decided to excuse commercial cards from upcoming interchange caps, a former vice-governor of the Chinese central bank said she thinks Bitcoin and [...]

We’re getting into the final weeks of 2014, with only 15 days left before the start of the new year and nine days until Christmas. This doesn’t mean the news is slowing down though. The global financial situation took some interesting turns since this time a week ago: France unveiled some new reforms to kick-start the [...]

As December winds down, some enterprises are finalizing their finances and working through budgets for 2015, while others prepare to close down for the week and a half between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. That’s not the case with us, however. Here at Payables Place, we’re going to continue publishing thoughtful articles right up through the [...]

The worldwide economic situation became more interesting last week. The United States enjoyed a barn-burner of a jobs report on Friday morning—312,000 jobs were created in November, while the unemployment rate held steady at 5.8%. Meanwhile, the Bank of International Settlements expressed some concern about the strength of the U.S. dollar and how that could [...]