After acquiring digital payments platform Acompay, American Express has launched its first automated accounts payable solution, AmEx announced last week. The announcement of American Express One AP, as it’s called, is the most recent by a string of companies introducing products that automate B2B payments.

American Express One AP is a software that commercial business clients integrate into their accounting systems, according to Trina Dutta, AmEx’s vice president of B2B payments automation for global commercial services. The integration enables business customers to organize and trigger payments to suppliers through different payment types across AmEx virtual cards, checks or ACH from one centralized hub.

The technology also analyzes who the company needs to pay, how much, how the supplier wants to be paid, and integrates with clients’ software through a file-based data transfer. AmEx serves 3.4 million businesses with 14.5 million card members, and the new One AP product is available to large, middle-market and high-revenue small business commercial card members in the U.S.

The coronavirus pandemic, and subsequent social distancing and remote work measures, have served as a catalyst for businesses to digitize and automate AP, Dutta said. Financial institutions are flocking to the opportunity to innovate within the commercial payments space.

KeyBank is currently working on accounts payable and receivable solutions to help businesses “better understand who owes them money and who they owe money to,” Jamie Warder, head of digital banking, recently told Bank Innovation. And last July Royal Bank of Canada acquired WayPay, a company that automates the AP process for businesses, for an undisclosed sum. Startups in the space are also catching investor interest, as AvidXchange raised $388 million this year and B2B payments startup Checkout.com raised $150 million in June to triple the company’s value to $5.5 billion.

“Often [commercial clients’] payment processes internally are very manual, antiquated and they are often very disparate,” Dutta said. “They’ll have a different check-printing system that will allow them to pay with checks, but if they wanted to make ACH payments or card payments, they’d have to make very different processes.”

AmEx One AP builds upon the company’s October 2019 acquisition of Acompay, which automates the payment processes for businesses by pulling in information from supplier invoices, and it is the next step in AmEx’s digital payments journey, Dutta said. “Acquiring a company in the commercial space and bringing it to market in a very fast timeline is something our commercial business hasn’t done for maybe 10 years,” she said, noting that AmEx’s AP digitization efforts have largely been partnership based. “When we bring it in house, we have a much better way to be responsive to customer needs … and control of the product roadmap.”

Alenka Grealish, senior analyst of corporate banking at Celent, previously told Bank Innovation these types of acquisitions give institutions a better view of the business supply chain. “The relationship is really sticky,” and the holistic view offers the potential to cross-sell other products.

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