Bento for Business, a Chicago-based B2B payments firm, today unveiled Bento Pay, which it claims is a first-of-its-kind digital payment service for small and mid-sized businesses. The service will roll out to customers in early July.

Co-founder and CEO Farhan Ahmad told Bank Innovation that Bento Pay eliminates the need to write paper checks and gives SMBs the ability to pay suppliers confidentially, regardless of their digital payment preferences. Bento Pay users need only a payee’s email address to send payments, eliminating the need to share financial information, he said. Payees, in turn, can elect to receive funds via a one-time use virtual card or ACH transfer.

“We’re all used to consumer-to-consumer payments and we’re used to a particular ease and convenience that we have in making those payments, but the B2B payment ecosystem is much more complex,” Ahmad said. “Bento Pay is very much mimicking that Venmo-like or Zelle-like experience but in the B2B world, where how vendors want to get paid is actually a very massive issue.”

A spokeswoman for Early Warning Services, the network operator behind Zelle, told Bank Innovation that B2B payments are “not something that we have on our roadmap today.”

Also see: Where’s the Zelle for Small Businesses?

The new capability rounds out Bento’s full-stack payments offering, which now includes debit and virtual cards, real-time payments and ACH transfers. These payment options elevate the Bento platform beyond its initial focus on spending and employee expense management, Ahmad said.

Asked whether there would be any transaction fees for Bento Pay, Ahmad noted that the cost of the service is built directly into the Bento platform and will be available to all customers through subscriber fees. “We obviously make money on everything that we do, but it’s all part of one comprehensive, cohesive, unified service, which sits beside our control layer and our reporting layer,” he said.