Thanks to GenAI - 2025 can be the Breakthrough Year for B2B Payments!

Context :

• B2B payments is USD 10+ Trillion market
• While consumer payments experience & automation has leapfrogged, B2B payment hasn’t evolved much in the last 40 years

There lies a huge opportunity to enhance efficiency and improve the experience in B2B payments by leveraging advanced payment technology.

But there are multiple challenges - the main one being the legacy & outdated systems/workflows - limiting industry's ability to adopt & integrate modern payment tech.

Lets take example of Health Insurance industry: The current experience for claim of health insurance is something like below -

1. the patient visits the hospital with an insurance card. Hospital validates the card and then provides services.
2. Hospital submits the bill to a third party administrator (TPA). TPA does initial checks and then passes on the bills to Insurance company.
3. Insurance company then approves/declines the claim and then hospital is made aware.
4. after 30-45 days, Insurance finance team compiles all the approvals and does an account transfer to Hospital (and in some cases even sends a cheque).
5. Then the hospital’s accounts team has to reconcile all the bills, often going back and forth to figure out which claims were approved or partially approved
6. For declined claim, hospital has to chase the patient for the balance

As you see, this process is rife with inefficiencies across claims management value chain - manual claim submission, claim reviews, multiple to & fros, complex reconciliation, delayed payments leading to cashflow concerns.

Now imagine a world where this whole Insurance workflow of claim management and disbursement is fully automated - the hospital raises a claim, the system auto approves or declines, and there is an automated payment triggered to the hospital with the details of claim for easy reconciliation and then response comes back to hospital.

This is where Agentic AI comes in.

Agentic AI was the upcoming trend of 2024 and is positioned to dominate 2025 by helping extract most value of GenAI for the businesses through end-end automation leveraging Compound AI systems framework.

Agentic AI refers to a system that is capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system by designing its workflow and leveraging LLMs with varying scale of autonomy.

To put it simply - while most of us have interacted with GenAI to access knowledge & create content. With AgenticAI, GenAI(LLMs) is expected to reflect & iterate its thinking, leverage other tools (may be a ML model or a web-search etc.), plan & reason to arrive to an answer and then most importantly take action in tandem with other tools as part of a workflow - making end to end automation possible for complex processes

So the new "Agentic" Insurance claim-process may look like -

1. a claim submission "AI agent" at hospital's end - will be able to access the hospital database of all the bills and doctor notes, do required checks against insurance claim rules, calculate the claim amount and submit the claim
2. which will go to a claim review "AI agent" at Insurance side - which will assess the claims and supporting documents. Refer back to their policy customer has and the agreement with the hospital and then decide the approved amount
3. which will then go to a payment "AI agent" which will initiate instant payment to the hospital with products of the likes of Mastercard Virtual Card along with all the required information regarding the claim for easy reconciliation
4. which will be then sent to hospital's accounts "AI agent" to summarize all the claim detail (decision, amount, other notes) to feed into database

Broader Implication on B2B payments

The health insurance industry is just an example. Take any such traditional industry (CPG, maritime, manufacturing, even govts) - that has been slow in technology adoption. Agentic AI is likely to transform each one of them - and while doing so, also drive faster adoption and integration of B2B payment automation as part of the workflow.

As we head into 2025, Agentic AI is set to reshape how businesses operate. Manual, outdated workflows are on their way out, and a smarter, more efficient world is coming. And this will hugely benefit the B2B payments industry! It’s an exciting time to be part of this transformation!