B2B fintech is maturing. It is less and less about yet another tool for handling payments or expenditure, and increasingly about eliminating manual work between invoices, the bank, ERP systems, accounts and cash management.
Just a few years ago, the digitalisation of finance often meant adding yet more systems. Payments, corporate cards, invoicing, receivables, debt collection, reporting and liquidity management all operated separately. Each of these automated a part of the process, but data still had to be reconciled, transferred and checked.
This model is beginning to reach the limits of its usefulness.
The latest survey by KPMG and ACCA amongst medium-sized and large companies in Poland clearly illustrates the problem. CFOs see the greatest potential for automation in accounting, invoicing and payment processing. At the same time, only 17 per cent rate the possibility of automating the entire process from order to payment highly. In half of the companies surveyed, month-end closing takes between four and six days, and in most organisations, 30–50 per cent of the related tasks are still carried out manually.
This is an important distinction. Invoice automation is not the same as financial automation. If a document passes digitally through a single system, but its data must later be manually reconciled with the purchase order, payment and general ledger, the company has digitised the document, not the process.
Fintech is entering ERP
This is why embedded finance is becoming increasingly important. Payments, financing and settlement no longer need to operate as separate services. They can be built directly into the software in which the transaction takes place.
A survey by Oliver Wyman of over 150 small and medium-sized enterprises in France, Germany and the Netherlands shows that around 46 per cent of them already use embedded finance. As many as 53 per cent cite an accounting system or ERP as their preferred point of access to such services, whilst for 79 per cent, their availability is a key factor when selecting software.
This is transforming the architecture of corporate finance. ERP systems no longer limit their role to simply recording a liability. It can initiate a payment, retrieve information from the bank, link a transaction to a document and update the cash position without the employee having to switch between several applications.
The scale of this impact is also evident in receivables. Unanet, a provider of ERP systems for design firms, has integrated payments directly into the invoicing and invoice management process. According to a Stripe case study, users of the solution reduced the average time to collect receivables by 30 days and increased cash flow by 20 per cent. These figures come from the technology provider, so they are not a universal benchmark, but they clearly illustrate where value is created: not in the mere acceptance of payments, but in the combination of invoices, reminders, payments and automatic reconciliation.
The problem is no longer a lack of technology
The barrier is shifting towards integration.
In this year’s KPMG survey, 42 per cent of Polish CFOs cited the lack of a coherent digitalisation strategy as the biggest obstacle to finance transformation. Problems with system integration and consistency were cited by 24 per cent, whilst data quality was cited by 23 per cent.
A similar picture emerges from a global EY survey covering over 1,600 CFOs and finance leaders. Only 21 per cent consider their departments to be advanced in terms of readiness to use AI. When it comes to investing in this technology, 61 per cent cite data quality as the main obstacle.
This also limits the potential of AI agents. EY describes a company in the automotive and electronics sector that implemented agent-based AI in its purchase-to-pay process and reduced the resources required to operate it by around 85 per cent. Such a result is only possible when the system has access to a consistent data stream from purchase to payment. AI added to a fragmented infrastructure will, above all, quickly reach its limits.
Poland is receiving a further boost
KSeF is accelerating this change regardless of companies’ investment decisions. From 1 February 2026, it will be mandatory for the system to receive invoices, whilst the obligation to issue them came into force for the largest taxpayers in February and for most other companies from April.
A standardised invoice provides financial systems with data in a format suitable for automated processing. It will not, in itself, streamline financial processes, but it removes one of the main obstacles: the need to read and transcribe information from documents in various formats.
The B2B fintech market is therefore shifting from the interface layer to the infrastructure layer. The most valuable product need not be the application that an employee uses every day. It may well be a mechanism that means they do not need to use it at all.
In operational finance, it is precisely the number of tasks eliminated, rather than the number of new features, that is increasingly becoming the best measure of a technology’s value.
