We live in a bifurcated financial reality. In our personal lives, money is fluid. You go to dinner with friends, split the bill, and tap a button on your phone. The money moves instantly. You get a confirmation; they get a notification. The transaction is settled before dessert arrives.
Then, you go to work as a Corporate Treasurer or an Accounts Payable manager. You need to pay a strategic supplier in Germany for a shipment of critical components. You log into an ERP, generate a payment file, approve it, and transmit it to the bank.
And then… you wait.
Depending on the rails used, the intermediary banks involved, and the time of day, that money might not “arrive” for two or three business days. If you miss the cut-off time on a Friday, the vendor might not see the funds until Wednesday. In an era where we can stream 4K video from Mars, why is the corporate movement of money still stuck in the 1970s?
The answer lies in the fundamental difference between “moving money” and “settling commerce.” The friction in B2B payments is not a bug; historically, it has been a feature designed to handle the massive complexity that consumer apps simply don’t face.
The “Rich Data” Dilemma
When you Venmo a friend $20 for “Pizza,” the data requirement is minimal. The context is irrelevant to the banking system.
In B2B commerce, the context is everything. A single wire transfer of $500,000 might cover 300 different invoices, minus 12 credit notes for damaged goods, with a 2% early payment discount applied to half of them, and specific tax withholding requirements for the other half.
If the money arrives without that data (the remittance information), it is useless. The supplier receives $500,000 but has no idea which invoices to close. Their AR team has to call your AP team to figure it out. This manual reconciliation cost is massive.
Legacy banking rails (like the MT formats used by SWIFT for decades) were like SMS text messages—they had limited character counts. They couldn’t carry the heavy “luggage” of invoice data. As a result, the money moved separately from the information. The delay in B2B payments is often the system pausing to ensure that the luggage eventually meets up with the passenger.
The Correspondent Banking Web
Consumer payments usually happen within a closed loop (Venmo to Venmo) or a domestic vacuum. Corporate payments are often cross-border.
To move money from a bank in Ohio to a bank in Frankfurt, the funds don’t teleport. They travel through a chain of “Correspondent Banks.” Bank A has a relationship with Bank B, who has a relationship with Bank C.
Each “hop” in this chain requires a ledger update, a compliance check, and a fee. If one bank in the chain is closed for a local holiday, the money stops. If one bank’s sanctions filter flags a false positive on the beneficiary’s name, the money stops. This architectural complexity is the primary driver of latency.
The Risk of Velocity
There is also the issue of irreversibility. Consumer apps have limits. You can’t accidentally Venmo $10 million.
In the corporate world, wire transfers are often irrevocable and massive. Speed is dangerous. If a hacker compromises a CEO’s email and requests an “urgent” transfer, and the payment system is instant, the money is gone before the CFO realizes it was a scam.
Traditional batch processing acts as a cooling-off period. It gives the internal controls team time to review the “payment run” before it is released to the bank. Moving to Real-Time Payments (RTP) removes this safety net, requiring companies to replace manual review with AI-driven fraud detection that operates in milliseconds.
The ISO 20022 Revolution
The good news is that the gap is closing. The financial world is currently undergoing the biggest infrastructure upgrade in 50 years: the migration to ISO 20022.
This is a new global standard for payment messaging. Unlike the old “SMS” style formats, ISO 20022 is XML-based. It is hierarchical and expansive. It allows the “luggage” (the invoice data, the tax info, the purpose codes) to travel inside the same digital envelope as the money.
This standardization solves the reconciliation problem. It allows machines to read the payment and automatically apply the cash on the other end. Once the data problem is solved, the speed problem becomes easier to tackle.
The Need for a Payment Hub
However, even with new standards, the complexity of managing 20 different banking portals and five different ERPs remains a bottleneck for most companies. The friction often isn’t the bank; it’s the internal mess of the corporation itself.
To truly achieve the “consumer-grade” experience in B2B—instant, transparent, and data-rich—companies are moving away from decentralized processes and toward centralized Payment Factories. By routing all global payments through a single hub, they can format the data correctly (ISO 20022), screen for fraud instantly, and select the fastest, cheapest rail for every transaction automatically.
Conclusion
The frustration of the “Friday Afternoon” payment delay is real, but it is fading. As the world transitions to data-rich formats and real-time clearing rails, the corporate treasurer will eventually have the same power in their office as they do on their phone.
But this power requires a new engine. You cannot run real-time, data-heavy payments on a fragmented, manual infrastructure. To bridge the gap between the speed you want and the security you need, implementing a centralized platform like Serrala Payments Solutions allows you to standardize your banking connectivity, ensuring that when you finally push the button, the money—and the data—moves at the speed of business. The future is instant, but only for those who are prepared to handle the velocity.
