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Author: Chris Haldane

The Hidden Cost of More Payments: What the Fed’s Latest Data Means for CFOs

Posted on by Chris Haldane

New Federal Reserve data reveals a gap between how fast payments are growing and how much value they’re actually moving, and that gap is quietly driving up operational costs for finance teams. 

A finance team can process payments faster than ever and still feel like they’re falling behind. That’s the uncomfortable reality buried in the Federal Reserve’s 2025 Payments Study, published July 1. 

The study found that noncash payments in the U.S. reached 236.6 billion in 2024, up nearly 32 billion since 2021. That’s the largest three-year increase the Fed has recorded since it began tracking noncash payment volume in 2000. On the surface, that looks like proof that digital payments have won. Businesses have moved past paper. The modernization story is finished. 

But the value moving through those payments tells a different story. Total noncash payment value reached $140.01 trillion, with annual growth slowing to 2.6%, down sharply from the 10.4% annual pace recorded between 2018 and 2021. Payment volume is climbing. Payment value is not climbing nearly as fast. 

Put plainly, finance teams are processing more payments to move roughly the same amount of money. 

That gap is the cost-per-event problem. Every payment, regardless of size, still requires reconciliation, exception handling, remittance matching and fraud screening. When the number of payments grows faster than their total value, the operational cost of the payments function grows too, even when nothing about the dollar volume suggests it should.

Why the instinct to switch rails misses the point 

When finance leaders feel this kind of strain, the usual response is to look at the rail. Maybe ACH is too slow for certain payments. Maybe cards cost too much in fees. Maybe it’s time to add a faster payments option and see if that eases the load. 

That instinct is understandable, and it’s also aimed at the wrong layer of the problem. The Fed’s data shows real specialization across payment types. Cards accounted for 79% of noncash payments by number in 2024 but only 8% of total value. ACH represented 74% of noncash value. Each rail is doing a distinct job, and neither is broken. 

What’s breaking is what happens after the payment clears. A card transaction that authorizes instantly still generates a settlement record that has to be matched to an invoice. An ACH payment that lands on time still shows up with incomplete or inconsistent remittance data that someone has to chase down. The rail did its job. The reconciliation didn’t happen on its own. 

This is the part of the cost-per-event problem that rail selection can’t fix. More noncash payments means more of these matching, chasing and correcting tasks, regardless of which rail carried the transaction. A finance team can be running entirely on modern, electronic rails and still be buried, because the bottleneck was never the transfer of funds. It’s the work required to turn that transfer into clean, usable financial data. 

“CFOs have spent the last several years being told that faster payments solve their problems. The Fed’s data confirms what we’re hearing directly from finance leaders: the payment clearing quickly was never the hard part. The hard part is everything that has to happen afterward to turn that payment into accurate, usable financial data. That’s where finance teams need a partner, not just a processor.“

Brad Bialas
Chief Commercial Officer, Fortis

What CFOs should actually be measuring 

The easiest gains in payments modernization have already been captured. What’s left is harder, and it isn’t about picking better rails. It’s about reducing the manual work required to reconcile, match and normalize what each payment generates after it clears. 

That reframes what CFOs should look for in a payments partner. The right question isn’t which rail is fastest or cheapest. It’s whether a payments partner automatically normalizes remittance data, reduces the manual matching burden and gives finance teams clean records without requiring a person to reconcile the gap by hand. 

The Fed’s data confirms a trend finance leaders already feel every day. Payments have gotten faster. They haven’t gotten simpler. Closing that gap, not just moving money quickly, is the real measure of a modern payments operation. 

If your finance team is feeling the weight of more payments activity without more resources to manage it, that’s not a sign you’re behind. It’s a sign the old measures of payments performance no longer capture what’s actually happening. Fortis helps businesses build payments operations that scale with volume instead of against it.

Ready to see what your payments operation could look like with less manual overhead?

Get in touch with Fortis

ARK Hospitality Customer Story

Posted on by Chris Haldane

About ARK Hospitality

ARK Hospitality Management is a hotel management company based in Plano, Texas, focused on maximizing performance and enhancing ownership returns across a growing national portfolio. As the company expands, building operational consistency across every new property has become critical to its growth strategy. 

With Fortis payments integrated across its portfolio, ARK Hospitality standardized payment operations, accelerated new property onboarding, and gained the financial visibility needed to support both property-level teams and corporate accounting. 

The Challenge 

Managing payments across a growing portfolio of branded and independent properties requires merchant accounts, banking relationships, payment devices, and reporting processes to be established before every new hotel opens. When payment providers moved slowly or communicated poorly, delays rippled across property operations and created unnecessary work for finance teams already stretched across multiple priorities. 

How Fortis Helped 

Fortis became an extension of ARK Hospitality’s operational team, helping establish a repeatable onboarding process that scales with the portfolio. General managers use the Fortis portal to manage daily payment activity, while corporate accounting relies on detailed transaction reporting to reconcile deposits and maintain visibility across every property. 

The Impact 

  • Established a repeatable onboarding process, accelerating implementation and reducing operational risk.
  • Empowered property teams to manage daily payment operations independently.
  • Improved visibility into payment activity across a growing portfolio.
  • Strengthened PCI compliance through proactive guidance.
  • Enabled faster, more accurate reconciliation through centralized reporting.

 

“The staff at Fortis has always gone above and beyond to help us. They’re very competent, they know what they’re doing, and they’re very quick to respond.”

— John Vandenbosch, Corporate Accounting and Treasury Manager, ARK Hospitality 

 

 

Concrete Pumping Holdings Customer Story

Posted on by Chris Haldane

About Concrete Pumping Holdings

Concrete Pumping Holdings—the nation’s largest concrete pumping company—manages payment activity across approximately 95 branch locations in 23 states. As the business scaled into a publicly traded, nationwide operation, its payment processes needed to scale with it.

The Challenge 

As transaction volumes grew, maintaining visibility became harder. Reconciling deposits from numerous locations took significant manual effort, chargebacks were difficult to track consistently, and corporate accounting often lacked timely insight into payment activity across the business.

How Fortis Helped 

Fortis worked closely with Concrete Pumping Holdings to design an implementation aligned with existing operational workflows. Today, customers pay through a secure payment portal, dispatch teams manage authorizations through an integrated internal portal, and payment data flows nightly into the company’s Sage 300 accounting system for consolidated, accurate reconciliation.

The Impact 

  • Centralized payment operations across every US location on a single platform.
  • Improved visibility into deposits, settlements and transaction activity.
  • More efficient reconciliation, reducing manual effort for accounting teams.
  • A simplified experience for dispatchers and branch teams.
  • Increased adoption of customer self-service payments.
  • A stronger PCI compliance posture at the branch level.
  • A consistent, well-supported process for managing chargebacks.

 

“Moving over to Fortis was one of the best business decisions we have made. It has streamlined our financials, it has made our teams more efficient, and it has made our customers much happier.”

— Megan Brame, Branch Administrative Policy & Implementation Manager, Concrete Pumping Holdings

 

 

MAP Retirement Customer Story

Posted on by Chris Haldane

About MAP Retirement

MAP Retirement is a fast-growing, technology-forward third-party administrator (TPA), serving more than 11,000 qualified retirement plans and over 1.5 million participants nationwide. MAP unites leading regional retirement administration firms under one technology platform, one culture, and one operating model, building a single, integrated organization on a national scale. 

With Fortis payments embedded directly into NetSuite, MAP standardized payment operations across every business it acquires, replacing a patchwork of inherited systems with one repeatable workflow built to scale with continued M&A activity. 

The Challenge 

MAP’s growth strategy depends on how quickly and cleanly it can fold newly acquired firms into a single operating model. Payments were one of the hardest places to do that. Every acquisition arrived with its own way of accepting payments and managing accounts receivable: some relied on QuickBooks Payments, others on antiquated accounting systems, and others still on paper checks. Each variation added manual work for the finance team and pushed standardization further out of reach. 

The volume raised the stakes. Twice a year, MAP issues more than 9,000 invoices to plan sponsors and employers, and posting and reconciling that volume by hand was never going to scale with the business. MAP didn’t need another payment processor. It needed a single, repeatable payment workflow that could integrate directly with NetSuite, scale with the organization, and become a standard part of every future acquisition. 

How Fortis Helped 

Fortis embedded payment workflows directly into MAP Retirement’s NetSuite environment, turning a patchwork of inherited systems into one standardized workflow across the organization. Every invoice sent to a plan sponsor or employer now carries a secure payment link, so clients can pay by ACH or credit card without ever leaving the billing experience. Payments post automatically to the correct records in NetSuite, cutting manual work and giving the finance team clear, real-time visibility. 

Just as important, Fortis established a repeatable merchant-onboarding process built for MAP’s acquisition strategy. As new organizations join MAP, their payment operations are incorporated into a consistent framework instead of being rebuilt from scratch, so payments accelerate integration instead of slowing it down. 

The Impact 

  • Standardized payment onboarding across nine acquired businesses
  • Significantly less manual payment posting and reconciliation for finance teams
  • 18,000+ invoices delivered each year, all with embedded payment capabilities
  • Reduced reliance on check-based collections through greater electronic payment adoption
  • Faster customer payments, with many invoices paid the same day they’re received
  • A scalable payment workflow inside NetSuite that supports continued M&A activity

 

“Fortis has become a core part of how we standardize payment workflows as we bring new acquisitions into the business.”

— Jennifer Wood, Finance Manager, MAP Retirement 

 

 

Roswell Rifle Works Customer Story

Posted on by Chris Haldane

About Roswell Rifle Works Gardens 

Roswell Rifle Works is a precision manufacturer based in Roswell, Georgia, producing high-quality, U.S.-made firearms for a specialized enthusiast market. As the company prepared to launch its flagship product, it was building more than a manufacturing operation—it was creating connected workflows that unified orders, inventory, production, fulfillment, and payments. 

With Fortis embedded payments integrated into its ecommerce and operational systems, Roswell Rifle Works streamlined payment acceptance, reduced manual processes, and built a scalable foundation for growth. 

The Challenge 

Launching a manufacturing business meant coordinating inventory, assembly, fulfillment, documentation, and customer communications from day one. Roswell Rifle Works had already built much of its own backend infrastructure, but payments still needed to operate as part of those workflows—not as a separate process. 

The company needed a payment partner that could integrate with its operational systems, support both ecommerce and in-person sales, and understand the needs of a specialized manufacturing business. 

How Fortis Helped 

Fortis embedded payments directly into Roswell Rifle Works’ ecommerce experience, allowing payments to move seamlessly through the same workflows that manage inventory, assembly, fulfillment, and documentation. 

When customers place an order, payment information flows directly into the company’s operational processes, reducing manual coordination while giving the team greater operational control. Fortis also enabled secure in-person payment acceptance for industry events, extending the same connected workflow beyond ecommerce. 

The Impact 

With Fortis embedded into its manufacturing workflows, Roswell Rifle Works launched with payments operating as an integrated part of the business rather than a separate function. 

  • Payments integrated directly with inventory, assembly, fulfillment, and documentation workflows.
  • Reduced manual coordination across manufacturing and order management processes.
  • Improved visibility into cash flow and payment activity.
  • Reliable payment acceptance for both ecommerce and in-person sales.
  • A scalable operational foundation built to support future growth.
  • A payments partner that understood the operational needs of a specialized manufacturer.

 

“A lot of providers say they work with companies like ours. Fortis was one of the few that actually understood what we were building. The team wanted to help, and in the end, they proved it.”

— Ralph Infanti, Owner, Roswell Rifle Works

 

 

Rosehill Gardens Customer Story

Posted on by Chris Haldane

About Rosehill Gardens 

Since 1914, Rosehill Gardens has grown from a Kansas City cemetery-maintenance operation into a full-service landscaping company spanning residential design, commercial contracts, wholesale nursery sales and hospitality. Rosehill grows approximately 90% of its own nursery stock across 750 acres and 55 greenhouses. 

As the business expanded into new lines, co-owners Gary Weidenbach and Curtis Stroud needed payment operations that could keep pace. By partnering with Fortis, Rosehill built a payment strategy flexible enough to match each part of the business, protecting margins on large contracts, accelerating receivables and giving finance a NetSuite-native foundation built to scale. 

The Challenge 

Growth brought new operational complexity. Rosehill’s residential landscaping projects, commercial contracts, wholesale nursery business and hospitality operations each served different customers with different payment expectations, and managing those workflows while maintaining visibility across finance required significant manual effort. 

For co-owner and CPA Curtis Stroud, payment efficiency wasn’t simply about accepting payments. It was about protecting profitability and building financial processes that could support continued growth. Before Fortis, Rosehill had limited flexibility in how it managed credit card costs: absorbing a 3% processing fee on a $50,000 commercial invoice meant sacrificing $1,500 in margin, with little control over how customers chose to pay. 

At the same time, Rosehill was migrating to NetSuite and wanted a payment solution that would integrate natively, simplify reconciliation and continue evolving alongside its ERP environment.

How Fortis Helped 

Fortis helped Rosehill build a payment strategy that better matched the needs of its business. Rather than applying the same payment experience to every customer, Rosehill gained the flexibility to tailor workflows by transaction type, customer relationship and business objective, waiving surcharges for wholesale customers who prioritize fast payment, while encouraging ACH or debit on larger residential and commercial projects to help preserve margins. 

Inside NetSuite, Fortis provides a consistent foundation, processing transactions, supporting reconciliation and enabling unapplied payments that help the finance team match field activity to bank records. 

The Impact 

That flexibility has driven measurable change. 

  • Surcharging flexibility applies or waives credit card fees by customer type, reducing processing costs on large dollar contracts.
  • ACH adoption has grown year over year, accelerating cash collection and reducing reliance on check processing.
  • Embedded payment links have increased self-service payment, improving accounts receivable velocity.
  • Faster invoice-to-payment cycles have improved cash flow and reduced time spent on collections.
  • NetSuite integration supports clean reconciliation and keeps pace with platform updates.
  • Customer portal capability is under evaluation for broader deployment across the business.

 

“If I want one company to handle every different type of transaction we’ve got, I think Fortis would be the company to do that.”

— Curtis Stroud, Co-Owner & CPA, Rosehill Gardens

 

 

WNW Hospitality Management Customer Story

Posted on by Chris Haldane

About WNW Hospitality Management 

WNW Hospitality Management supports hotel properties across multiple states under brands including IHG, Hilton, Best Western, Choice Hotels, Hyatt, and Marriott. As its portfolio grew, WNW needed a simpler way to manage payments across different processors, property systems, and brand requirements. With Fortis, WNW moved to a centralized payments and accounts receivable model that gives its corporate team portfolio-wide visibility, consistent support, and a repeatable process for onboarding new properties. 

The Challenge 

Before Fortis, Ryan Kinder, VP of Portfolio Performance at WNW, managed payment operations across multiple payment processors, each with its own login, reporting process, and account contacts. As the portfolio expanded, that complexity grew, making it harder to maintain consistent oversight and visibility for stakeholders, including hotel owners. 

How Fortis Helped 

Fortis brought WNW’s payment and accounts receivable operations under one platform. Ryan now monitors disputes, batch processing, and account activity in one place, supported by a dedicated relationship manager who keeps onboarding consistent as new properties come online. 

The Impact 

  • Centralized payment management across a diverse hotel portfolio.
  • Gained a single view into disputes, batch activity, and account details. 
  • Simplified new property onboarding with a repeatable setup process. 
  • Used pre-batch alerts to catch transaction issues before settlement. 
  • Built a support partnership suited to 24/7 hospitality operations. 
  • Created a scalable model that flexes across brands and existing agreements. 

 

“You can’t really put a price on having actual human beings working with you. That’s what’s important to us.”

— Ryan Kinder, VP of Portfolio Performance, WNW Hospitality Management

 

 

Are Your Payments Working as Hard as Your Business?

Posted on by Chris Haldane

Read time: 4 minutes 

Most businesses in manufacturing, construction, wholesale distribution, and professional services spend considerable time measuring the parts of their operations that drive performance. They track production schedules, job costing, inventory turns, customer terms, cash flow, and countless operational KPIs. 

Payments, by contrast, are often set up once and left alone. 

As long as invoices are going out and customers are paying, it’s easy to assume everything is working as it should. But processing payments and maximizing payment performance are two very different things. 

Here’s the question most businesses have never asked: How well are your payments actually performing compared to businesses like yours? 

If you don’t know the answer, you’re not alone. Most organizations have never benchmarked their payment performance. Without that context, it’s nearly impossible to know whether you’re operating efficiently or quietly leaving revenue, cash flow, and operational improvements on the table.

The Difference Between Payments That Process and Payments That Perform 

One of the biggest blind spots in B2B operations is assuming that because payments are processing, they’re performing. 

In reality, payment underperformance rarely announces itself. It shows up as failed transactions, unnecessary processing costs, slower cash flow, manual reconciliation, disconnected workflows, or customers who encounter friction when they’re ready to pay. None of those issues may appear as a single line item on a report, but together they can create a meaningful drag on financial performance. 

Consider a few examples. 

  • A manufacturer with net-30 terms and a manual invoicing process may be carrying more days sales outstanding than necessary, not because customers are unwilling to pay, but because the payment experience itself creates unnecessary delays. 
  • A wholesale distributor processing thousands of invoices may have little visibility into which payment methods are underperforming or how its payment acceptance rate compares with similar businesses. 
  • A construction company managing progress billing and retainage may spend hours every month reconciling payments across disconnected systems without realizing there are more efficient ways to manage the workflow. 

None of these represent broken payment systems. They represent payment performance that has never been measured.

What Most Businesses Have Never Measured 

Consider a simple question: Do you know your payment acceptance rate? 

More importantly, do you know how it compares with businesses of similar size and within your industry? Most businesses don’t. 

That isn’t because they’re doing anything wrong. Historically, payment performance data has been difficult to access, even harder to interpret, and nearly impossible to benchmark without broad visibility into how comparable organizations are performing. 

As a result, many payment decisions are still made based on familiarity, processing costs, or whether the existing system appears to be functioning. Those are reasonable factors to consider, but they don’t tell the whole story. 

Benchmarking does. It shifts the conversation from “Are our payments running?” to “Are our payments helping the business perform better?”

Introducing the Fortis Growth Index 

That’s exactly why Fortis created the Growth Index. The Fortis Growth Index is a free benchmarking assessment that helps businesses evaluate how their payments are performing compared with peers in their industry, vertical, and revenue range. 

In less than two minutes, the assessment evaluates four key dimensions of payment performance: 

  • Visibility into payment data and performance 
  • Alignment between payment options and customer preferences 
  • Friction throughout the payment experience 
  • How effectively your payment strategy supports long-term business growth 

The result is a personalized score with practical insights into where your payments are performing well and where opportunities may exist to improve efficiency, accelerate cash flow, and strengthen the customer experience. 

For many businesses, the findings aren’t dramatic. Payments aren’t broken. They’re simply capable of doing more.

Visibility Creates Better Decisions 

The businesses that get the most value from their payments aren’t necessarily the ones with the newest technology or the lowest processing rates. They’re the ones that understand how their payments are performing and use that visibility to continuously improve. 

That’s the real value of benchmarking. Once you understand where your payment experience stands today, you can make more informed decisions about where to reduce friction, improve cash flow, streamline operations, and better support future growth. 

If you’ve never measured your payment performance against businesses like yours, there’s a good chance you’re missing opportunities you simply can’t see today. 

The Fortis Growth Index gives you a fast, practical way to uncover them. 

See how your payment performance measures up.

Take the Free Growth Index Assessment

Your ERP Runs Your Business. Your Payments Should Run Through It. 

Posted on by Chris Haldane

Fortis and Pine Services Group are closing the gap between ERP systems and payments for thousands of businesses.  

Ask most finance teams how payments and their ERP system work together, and you’ll get a tired laugh. Payments usually get bolted on after the ERP is already live, through a separate provider, on a separate timeline, with its own login and its own data. The two systems were never built to talk to each other, so someone on the finance team has to do the talking for them: exporting reports, matching transactions by hand, chasing down discrepancies. All just to answer where cash actually stands.  

Fortis and Pine Services Group are teaming up to close that gap, so payments and accounts receivable work inside the ERP platforms businesses already run on, instead of alongside them. 

Fewer Systems, Fewer Hours Lost to Reconciliation  

Fortis builds ERP-native embedded payment workflows, meaning payment processing, ACH, and accounts receivable live directly inside platforms like NetSuite, Sage, and Acumatica rather than in a separate portal. Through this partnership, that capability now reaches Pine’s North American network of ERP consulting firms and VARs, the same advisors already helping businesses evaluate and implement the systems that run their financial operations.  

The practical result: instead of assembling ERP, payments, and AR as three separate pieces over time, businesses can build one connected financial workflow from the start. Less manual reconciliation, better visibility into cash flow, and a finance team that spends its time on analysis instead of data entry.  

Chris Milan

“Payments are one of the highest-impact ways our portfolio companies can create value for their customers, and Fortis is a best-in-class partner to help them do it. Their embedded technology fits directly into the ERP systems we support, and we are thrilled to bring that capability to the Pine community.”  

Chris Milan
Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, Pine Services Group

 

A New Revenue Line for ERP Consultants and VARs  

This isn’t only a smoother rollout for the businesses on the receiving end. For Pine’s network of consulting firms and VARs, it’s a new way to deepen the client relationship and generate recurring revenue. Rather than handing payments off to a separate provider once the ERP implementation wraps, partners can bring payments into the deal itself and get compensated for it on an ongoing basis, not just at the point of sale. 

Sanjay Ejantkar

“Pine Services Group owns one of the strongest portfolios of ERP-focused VARs in the market. What excites me is that they think like operators, not just resellers. They understand the embedded payments opportunity from inside their own businesses, and that gives them a real head start activating it across their portfolio. We’re aligned on customer outcomes and committed to proving this works at scale. I’m genuinely excited about what we can build together.”

Sanjay Ejantkar
SVP, Partner Experience & Success, Fortis

The Bottom Line  

ERP platforms have become the operational center of most businesses. Payments can’t keep sitting next to that center. They need to live inside it. Fortis and Pine Services Group are helping ERP consultants, VARs, and the businesses they serve build that connection from day one, instead of patching it in after the fact.  

Want to see how Fortis can connect payments to your ERP? Contact us.

Agentic Payments: What ERP and Software Platforms Need to Decide Now

Posted on by Chris Haldane

Read time: 5 minutes 

Right now, somewhere in your client base, a finance leader or operations manager is reading about AI agents that can initiate purchases, approve invoices, and manage vendor payments autonomously. They’re asking their software vendors what that means for the platforms they run their business on. Most of those vendors don’t have a good answer yet. 

That gap is where platform differentiation is being won and lost. 

Agentic payments is the point at which AI moves from surfacing recommendations to acting on them. In a B2B context, that means AI systems initiating, approving, and completing payments inside the workflows your platform manages, without a human in the loop at the moment of execution. For businesses running on ERP and vertical software, the implications touch purchase orders, approval chains, credit terms, vendor relationships, and the integrity of financial records that have to be accurate in real time. 

Most platforms serving these businesses haven’t fully reckoned with what that requires at the infrastructure level. The ones that do will be in a categorically different position with their clients over the next three to five years.

What Does Agentic Payments Actually Mean for B2B Platforms? 

Agentic payments in a consumer context is relatively straightforward to visualize: an AI assistant that reorders supplies when inventory hits a threshold, or completes a purchase without waiting for a human to confirm it. The concept is easy to grasp and, for consumer commerce, fairly contained. 

For ERP and software platforms serving B2B businesses, the picture is more layered. The businesses your platform serves don’t operate with simple transaction histories and one-click purchases. They operate with multi-tiered approval workflows, purchase orders tied to project accounting, vendor credit terms, and ERP records that need to reflect every financial obligation accurately and immediately. When AI agents start initiating and completing payments inside those environments, the infrastructure requirements are considerably more demanding than anything consumer-facing agentic commerce asks of a payment system. 

Getting ahead of those requirements is the work in front of platform leaders right now.

What Does Agentic Payment Infrastructure Actually Require? 

When a client asks whether your platform supports agentic payment workflows, the surface answer is about capability. The more consequential answer is about architecture, specifically whether the payment infrastructure underneath your platform was built in a way that can support autonomous payment activity responsibly. 

The governance questions that come with agentic payments are substantive. When an AI agent initiates a payment, how does that transaction move through existing approval workflows? How does it reconcile against ERP records at settlement? What controls ensure it’s operating within the parameters a business has actually authorized? How are disputes resolved when there’s no human who made the purchase decision? When an auditor asks why an action was taken, how do you respond? 

Kevin Shamoun, SVP of Platform Innovation at Fortis, puts it directly: “The platforms that are going to lead on agentic payments aren’t the ones rushing to ship a feature. They’re the ones asking the hard questions about disputes, accountability, and workflow integrity now, before those questions become urgent for their clients.” 

These aren’t questions that get resolved in a product sprint. They get resolved in the payment infrastructure decisions a platform makes before agentic use cases are even on the roadmap, which is precisely why the timing matters more than most platform leaders currently appreciate. 

Why Do Platform Infrastructure Decisions Made Now Matter So Much Later? 

Payment capabilities have historically been a threshold conversation for ERP and software platforms. Clients expect to process payments inside the platform, and most platforms have converged on a similar answer to that expectation. Agentic payments shifts that entirely. 

A platform that can offer its business users a credible path to autonomous payment workflows, with the governance controls, ERP integration, and dispute resolution infrastructure to back it up, is offering something genuinely differentiated. Not every platform will be able to make that case, and the gap between those that can and those that can’t will widen as client expectations develop. 

The differentiation window is the period between now and when agentic payments becomes an expectation rather than a competitive advantage. Platforms making infrastructure decisions today with that future in mind are building a lead. The ones waiting for the use cases to fully mature before making those decisions will find the distance harder to close. 

“We’re already working with the card brands and payment associations to make sure Fortis is aligned with where agentic commerce is heading,” says Shamoun. “That work doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s not something platforms should expect to figure out independently. The infrastructure groundwork has to be laid now.” 

What Does a Payment Partner Built for Agentic Commerce Look Like? 

For most ERP publishers and software platforms, building agentic payment infrastructure independently isn’t a realistic path. The requirements span payment rails, card brand governance, regulatory frameworks, real-time ERP integration, and dispute resolution, and they’re evolving as the ecosystem defines the rules in real time. 

A payment partner built for agentic commerce is one already engaged in that ecosystem conversation, working with card brands and associations to ensure the infrastructure is ready when agentic payments moves from emerging to expected. The platforms building on that foundation inherit that preparation rather than having to replicate it. 

The clip below captures Kevin’s perspective on where agentic commerce stands today and what Fortis is doing to get ahead of it. 

 

What Should ERP and Software Platforms Be Doing Right Now? 

The ERP and software platforms that will be most valuable to their clients three years from now are the ones making deliberate infrastructure decisions today. Not necessarily shipping agentic payment features in the next quarter, but ensuring the payment foundation they’re building on is architected to support autonomous payment workflows when the market is ready for them. 

That’s a different conversation than most platforms are currently having with their payment partners. It requires a partner that is actively participating in how agentic payments is being defined at the infrastructure level, not one that will show up with a solution after the standards are already set. 

Fortis is engaged in that work now. If you want to understand what it means for your platform’s roadmap, let’s talk. 

Workflow Commerce Through the CFO’s Lens: Why B2B Payment Workflows Are a Finance Problem

Posted on by Chris Haldane

When payments and financial operations don’t talk to each other, finance absorbs the cost. Here’s what that actually looks like, and how to fix it.

Read time: 5 minutes

The payment cleared on Tuesday. The invoice didn’t close until Friday. Nobody flagged it as a problem because from a payments standpoint, nothing went wrong. The customer paid on time and the funds arrived as expected.

But those three days in between are where your working capital problem actually lives.

This is the part of B2B payment operations that rarely gets examined as a payment problem. It gets absorbed into finance as reconciliation overhead, or accepted as the natural lag of a manual close process, or written off as something that would improve with more headcount. What it actually reflects is a structural gap between how B2B payment workflows function and how financial operations need them to work, and closing that gap is one of the more consequential decisions a CFO can make.

That gap is what Workflow Commerce is designed to address.

What Is Workflow Commerce? 

Workflow Commerce starts with a straightforward observation: in B2B, a payment is never just a transaction. It originates in a contract, a purchase order, a project milestone, or an invoice generated inside an ERP. Before a customer pays anything, that payment has already moved through approval logic, touched credit terms, and been tied to a set of operational obligations the business needs to track. After the payment clears, the invoice has to be marked settled, the customer balance has to update, the reconciliation has to close, and finance needs an accurate picture of what’s outstanding and what’s genuinely collectible. 

Most payment systems handle the moment of acceptance reasonably well. What they don’t handle well is everything surrounding it. 

The dominant approach to B2B payments over the last decade has been digitization, converting paper-based processes to electronic ones. That progress was real and necessary, but digitization and orchestration are fundamentally different things. Digitization converts a process; orchestration connects them. Most B2B finance operations have digitized their payments without orchestrating them, which means the transaction gets processed electronically while the payment data still has to be exported, matched, and manually reconciled against what the ERP expects. 

Workflow Commerce is the operating model that closes that gap. It’s payments designed to function as infrastructure inside the business, connected to invoicing, reconciliation, ERP records, and workflow logic, rather than as a transactional layer sitting adjacent to operations. 

For a deeper look at where B2B payment workflows break down and why the transaction succeeding isn’t the same thing as the workflow succeeding, this piece gets into the specifics.

Why This Is a Finance Leadership Problem 

The version of this that CFOs and VPs of Finance recognize immediately isn’t about payment infrastructure. It’s about what happens in finance every month when the books need to close. 

Payment acceptance is functioning. Processing is running. By every metric the payment system surfaces, things look fine. And yet the close cycle still drags, the AR aging report is still a few days behind, and the working capital forecast is still built on assumptions because there’s no clean, real-time view of what’s resolved and what’s genuinely at risk. 

That operational overhead doesn’t show up as a payment failure, which is precisely why it rarely gets traced back to payment infrastructure. Instead it gets framed as a staffing issue, a systems limitation, or simply the cost of operating at this scale. The gap between what the payment system knows and what the ERP needs to know is filled by people, and filling it manually shows up in close cycle length, reporting lag, and the capacity of a finance team spending a meaningful portion of every month on reconciliation rather than analysis.

Where the Gap Shows Up in Practice 

For a CFO evaluating where B2B payment workflows are creating operational drag, the friction points tend to cluster in the same places regardless of industry. 

Reconciliation lag is the most common. Payment data and ERP records aren’t syncing in real time, so someone has to manually pull payment files, match them against open invoices, and clear exceptions before the books can close. The process isn’t broken, it’s just absorbing overhead that scales directly with payment volume. 

AR visibility is the second pressure point. A customer paid three days ago, but the ERP doesn’t reflect it yet because the sync hasn’t run. Every downstream decision about when to follow up, what’s genuinely at risk, and how much working capital is available is made with incomplete data. 

Cash application exceptions are the third. Payments that don’t match cleanly, because of a partial payment, a remittance discrepancy, or a credit that wasn’t applied correctly, require manual intervention before the books reflect what’s actually happened. At low volume this is manageable. At scale it becomes a meaningful operational burden. 

None of this is a consequence of a poorly functioning payment system. It’s the consequence of payment systems and financial operations systems that weren’t designed to share a coherent, real-time picture of the business. 

What Changes When Payments Operate Inside the Workflow 

When payment infrastructure is built to operate inside financial workflows rather than alongside them, the impact runs through the full invoice-to-cash cycle. 

Payment activity updates ERP records at settlement. Invoices close, customer balances reflect accurately, and reconciliation happens within the same workflow that generated the financial obligation rather than in a separate downstream process. Workflow logic, the business rules governing approvals, credit terms, follow-up sequences, and exception handling, can drive payment behavior automatically rather than requiring someone to catch and route exceptions by hand. 

The more consequential shift is in financial visibility. When payment workflows are genuinely connected to operational systems, finance has a live picture of receivables rather than a lagging one assembled from exports. Working capital decisions are based on current data. The close cycle stops being held up by reconciliation that hasn’t finished, and finance teams stop spending capacity on work the system should be doing.

The Strategic Frame for Finance Leaders 

Workflow Commerce isn’t a technology decision that belongs in an IT evaluation. It’s a financial operations decision, and it belongs in the same conversation finance leaders are already having about close cycle performance, working capital efficiency, and AR team capacity. 

The businesses moving from transaction optimization to workflow orchestration gain working capital clarity, reduce the overhead embedded in every close cycle, and give their finance teams the capacity to do the work finance is actually supposed to do: analyzing, forecasting, and driving decisions rather than reconciling and managing exceptions a well-designed system would handle automatically. 

For a CFO evaluating payment infrastructure, the right question isn’t whether the system processes payments. It’s whether the system makes financial operations more accurate, more visible, and more in control. That’s the standard Workflow Commerce is built to meet, and the standard Fortis is built to deliver. 

If you’re ready to evaluate where your current B2B payment workflows are creating operational drag, let’s talk. 

WMHT Public Media Customer Story

Posted on by Chris Haldane

About WMHT

WMHT Public Media serves New York’s Capital Region and Western New England with PBS, NPR, and local radio programming, including rock and classical music. As a lean nonprofit finance team supporting underwriting and client services billing, WMHT needed a more efficient way to manage recurring invoices, customer payments, and AR follow-up.

With Sage AR Automation and Fortis payments integrated with Sage Intacct, WMHT modernized its receivables process, gave customers a self-service payment experience, and freed its AR team to focus on higher-value accounting work.

The Challenge

WMHT’s billing process was structured for recurring contracts in Sage Intacct, but the AR follow-up process still required significant manual effort. Without a customer-facing portal, the team spent time emailing invoices, responding to duplicate invoice requests, answering payment status questions, and managing manual internal handoffs.

How Fortis Helped

Fortis payments integrated with Sage AR Automation and Sage Intacct gave WMHT a connected AR experience: invoices, customer self-service, and payments flowing through one streamlined process. The team also tailored reminder timing and messaging to create a respectful, customer-friendly rollout.

The Impact

  • Customers began self-serving through the new payment portal within the first hour of go-live.
  • Within two weeks, clients were prepaying invoices ahead of schedule.
  • Payment cycles improved compared to the prior processor.
  • Manual AR follow-up decreased.
  • The AR specialist’s role expanded into broader accounting responsibilities.
  • WMHT gained a connected experience across Sage Intacct, Sage AR Automation, and Fortis payments.

“We’re a small but dedicated and very knowledgeable team. We do the analysis. We understand our business, Fortis fits how we work—and the integration with Sage was seamless.”
— Julie Raskin, VP & CFO of WMHT Public Media

Partnership in Action: How Flexible Partnerships Drive Growth

Posted on by Chris Haldane

Every successful partnership looks different

Every partner grows differently. Some want hands-on support. Others need a white-label experience. Many are balancing multiple customer needs, growth goals, and operational priorities at once.

The best partnerships aren’t built around a predefined playbook. They’re built around the unique goals, business models, and customer experiences each organization is working to create.

That’s why Fortis takes a flexible approach to partnership.

Whether you’re supporting chiropractic practices through referrals, offering a fully branded experience, collaborating on sales opportunities, or operating somewhere in between, our focus remains the same: helping you increase payment adoption, improve customer experiences, and create new opportunities for sustainable growth.

Because when our partners grow, we grow.

A Partnership Model Built Around Your Goals

Partnership flexibility isn’t just about how we work together. It’s about creating the right foundation for growth.

Some partners prefer a sales-assisted approach, where Fortis provides support throughout the customer journey—from initial conversations through ongoing service and optimization. Others choose a white-label model that keeps their brand front and center while leveraging Fortis’ technology, expertise, and operational support behind the scenes.

Many partners combine elements of both.

What matters isn’t the model itself. It’s having the flexibility to create an experience that aligns with your customers’ needs, your business objectives, and your long-term growth strategy.

The approach may vary, but the outcome remains the same: helping practices improve payment workflows, enhance patient experiences, increase payment adoption, and support sustainable business growth.

More Than a Payments Provider. A Strategic Growth Partner.

Successful partnerships require more than technology.

They require collaboration, expertise, and a shared commitment to delivering results.

That’s why Fortis works alongside partners to identify opportunities, solve operational challenges, improve payment adoption, and help turn payments into a stronger driver of customer value and business growth.

Whether that means sales collaboration, educational resources, business development support, strategic planning, or customer guidance, our goal remains the same: helping you create stronger customer relationships and drive sustainable growth.

Creating Greater Visibility into Success

Strong partnerships are built on transparency.

As our partner program continues to evolve, we’re investing in new ways to provide greater visibility into performance, opportunities, and outcomes.

Our goal is to help partners better understand the impact of their programs, identify areas for growth, and make more informed business decisions over time.

This is more than reporting.

It’s about giving partners the insights needed to strengthen customer relationships, improve performance, and uncover new growth opportunities.

Partnership in Action

Become a Fortis PAX Early Adopter

Help shape the future of Fortis’ next-generation payment platform while gaining early access to new PAX devices.

  • ✓  Early access to new hardware
  • ✓  Influence future enhancements
  • ✓  Lower deployment costs
  • ✓  Modern payment experiences

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Looking Ahead

Partnership in Action isn’t just about how we support our partners today. It’s about how we continue building together tomorrow.

We’re actively exploring new ways to strengthen collaboration, expand partner resources, improve visibility, and create even greater value for the practices, providers, and customers we collectively serve. After all, the strongest partnerships continue evolving as new opportunities for growth emerge.

Help Shape What’s Next

Your feedback drives what we build.

Your feedback plays an especially important role in how we evolve our partner experience. Take our one-minute survey and share your perspective.

Take the Partner Survey →

How ERP Publishers Are Turning Payments into a Revenue Line (Not a Line Item)

Posted on by Chris Haldane

For ERP publishers, payments are no longer just a feature. They’re a revenue stream waiting to be activated.  

For years, payments have been an afterthought for ERP publishers. You built powerful software to run the back office, and payments were just the thing that happened at the end of the workflow. A necessary feature. A box to check. 

ERP publishers are rethinking that. The ones who recognize the shift are building a meaningful new revenue stream in the process. The ones who don’t? They’re leaving compounding revenue on the table every single day.

What does it mean to embed payments inside an ERP platform? 

Embedded payments for ERP means the payment workflow lives natively inside your software—invoices, collections, and reconciliation all flow through one system automatically. There’s no handoff, no gap, no workaround. Your customers run their receivables inside your platform, and your platform becomes the operational backbone of their business. 

That’s different from a connected payment tool, which is bolted on. It technically works, but it creates friction. Your customers end up managing separate logins, reconciling data manually, and toggling between systems just to get a complete view of their accounts receivable. Your platform becomes one of several tools in the stack rather than the center of it. 

That distinction matters for your customers’ experience. It matters even more for your business model.

Why are ERP publishers leaving payment revenue on the table? 

Most ERP platforms today fall into one of two camps. Some have integrated a third-party payment tool that technically covers the basics but hasn’t been built for the complexity of B2B payment workflows. It can’t handle multichannel environments, invoice-level reconciliation, or the varied payment methods a typical B2B customer base requires. Others have payments working but haven’t activated the revenue side. 

Either way, the result is the same: payment volume flows through your platform, but the economics don’t flow back to you. 

This isn’t a small miss. Mid-market B2B businesses are the core customer base for most ERP publishers, and they typically process hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in payment volume annually. Multiply that across your customer base and the number gets large, fast. ERP payment processing is already happening inside your software. The question is whether you’re participating in it. 

How does payment monetization actually work for software platforms? 

A common assumption is that building a payments revenue stream requires major lift: new infrastructure, compliance overhead, dedicated headcount. In practice, the right embedded payments partner handles that complexity on your behalf. 

Most publishers expect building a payments revenue stream to mean new infrastructure, compliance overhead, and headcount. It doesn’t. The right partner handles that complexity. You embed their infrastructure through a single API integration and start earning on your customers’ payment volume. That’s it. 

What you get in return is a revenue-sharing model tied directly to your customers’ payment volume. As your customers grow and process more payments, your payment revenue grows with them. It scales automatically—no additional headcount, no product development. 

This model is gaining traction fast—and the publishers moving on it now will have a compounding advantage. It transforms payments from a utility your customers expect into a revenue engine that builds over time.

What does embedded payment revenue mean for platform stickiness? 

Most publishers focus on the monetization case. They miss the retention case. 

When payments are embedded in your ERP, your customers aren’t just using your software to manage their operations. They’re running their receivables through it. Invoices go out through your platform with links to pay, collections come in through your platform, and reconciliation happens automatically inside your platform. That’s a different kind of dependency—and a much stickier one. 

The practical result is that switching costs go up significantly. Walking away from your ERP means walking away from their entire payment operation, including their history, their workflows, and their customer payment relationships. That’s a much harder decision than switching a standalone tool. 

For ERP publishers thinking about customer lifetime value and retention, embedded payments are a structural advantage.

What should ERP publishers look for in an embedded payments partner? 

Not all embedded payment partnerships are built the same way. The right partner goes beyond technology, though technology matters. Here’s what to evaluate: 

Your business customers operate in multichannel environments and need to accept a range of payment methods—cards, ACH, digital wallets, and more. Your payment partner should enable all of it through a single integration. If they can’t, you’re stitching together multiple solutions and passing that complexity to your customers. 

Consumer payment processing and B2B payment processing are not the same thing. B2B workflows involve invoice-level reconciliation, complex approval chains, and payment methods that simply don’t exist in consumer contexts. Your partner should already understand these nuances, not learn them on your customers’ dime. 

The best embedded payment partnerships operate on a revenue-sharing model that aligns incentives. Your partner should be invested in your customers’ adoption and success, not just the initial integration. Look for dedicated onboarding support and ongoing optimization throughout the partnership lifecycle—not just a handoff after go-live. 

Finally, ask whether your partner owns their technology or resells someone else’s. Partners who control their full stack give you more flexibility, faster iteration, and a more cohesive experience for your customers. Infrastructure dependencies you can’t see become your problem eventually.

The revenue line is already there. The question is whether you activate it. 

Payment volume already flows through your platform. Your customers are already paying and getting paid inside your software. The investment your competitors are making right now is in turning that existing volume into a recurring revenue stream that scales automatically as their customer base grows. 

The publishers who move on this now will have a structural advantage—not because the technology is hard, but because the compounding effect takes time to build. Every month you’re not participating in your customers’ payment volume is a month of recurring revenue you can’t recover. 

The payment infrastructure is already in your platform. The revenue opportunity is already there. The question is whether you’re the one capturing it. 

Payment volume is already flowing through your platform. The question is who’s capturing the revenue from it. If you’re ready to find out what that number could look like for your customer base reach out.

Visa CEDP: Your B2B Payment Rates Now Depend on Your Data Quality

Posted on by Chris Haldane

Eight months into Visa’s Commercial Enhanced Data Program, the cost of non-verification is showing up on processing statements. Most businesses are finding the problem starts well before a payment is made. 

Visa’s Commercial Enhanced Data Program (CEDP) began actively assessing merchant data in October 2025. For the first several months, many B2B businesses felt limited impact. That’s changing fast. 

As more transaction history accumulates under Visa’s AI-driven validation model, businesses are seeing the real cost on their processing statements. Some are further from compliance than they thought. And most are discovering the problem isn’t their payment processor—it’s the data flowing into payments from their business systems. 

We covered the mechanics of CEDP (including how verification works, what the interchange rate differences look like, and how Fortis-integrated ERP platforms support compliance) in an earlier post. This post is about what businesses are finding out now that the program is real and the costs are visible.

What Is Visa CEDP and How Does Verification Work? 

Visa’s Commercial Enhanced Data Program (CEDP) replaces the traditional Level 2 and Level 3 interchange framework with a single AI-driven verification model. To qualify for Visa’s preferred Product 3 interchange rates, merchants must pass an ongoing review of their transaction data. The required fields go well beyond basic payment information and include: 

  • Purchase order numbers 
  • Product descriptions and SKUs 
  • Quantities and unit costs 
  • Extended line-item totals 
  • Tax information, including tax-exempt status 
  • Freight and shipping amounts 
  • Duty amounts where applicable 

Visa evaluates qualification transaction by transaction but determines verification status at the merchant level. If your data doesn’t consistently meet Visa’s requirements across your transaction history, your entire account misses Product 3 rates—even if most of your transactions are clean. Visa retired the legacy Level 2 and Level 3 commercial interchange framework in April 2026, so there’s no fallback path for Visa Product 3 qualification. 

Businesses without verified status may see rate increases of approximately 0.75% depending on card category and transaction profile. At meaningful B2B payment volume, that is a material and recurring cost.

Why Are So Many B2B Businesses Failing CEDP Verification? 

Two things are tripping businesses up, and the second one is less obvious than the first. 

The first is the end of data backfilling. For years, some businesses believed they were processing at Level 3 standards because their processors were manufacturing required data fields behind the scenes. Visa’s AI validation reviews actual transaction data, and backfilled or incomplete fields do not pass. Businesses that were relying on that shortcut, often without knowing it, are now finding out the hard way. 

The second and more widespread issue is ERP data quality and connectivity. 

PO numbers, SKUs, unit costs, freight details, tax amounts and status: that information originates in your ERP, your order management system, your invoicing workflow. It doesn’t live in your payment process. If it’s incomplete, inconsistently captured, or siloed from your payment integration, no processor can fix it at the point of transaction. 

“CEDP is revealing something that has been true for a long time: payment performance is downstream of data quality,” says Kevin Shamoun, SVP, Product & Innovation, Fortis. “If the information in your ERP is incomplete or siloed, it will show up in your interchange rates now. The businesses that treat this as an operational readiness problem, not just a payments compliance question, are the ones that will come out ahead.”  

ERPs were built to manage inventory, customer records, invoicing, and finance—not payment data requirements. For many businesses, the data Visa needs technically exists somewhere in their systems. It just isn’t flowing cleanly and consistently into payment transactions the way CEDP now requires.

What Data Does Visa CEDP Actually Require? 

CEDP verification requires complete, accurate transaction-level data with each B2B Visa card payment. The challenge isn’t knowing what the fields are—Visa has published those clearly. The challenge is whether your business systems can reliably produce and transmit that data for every transaction, across every payment path. 

That includes standard invoiced sales—but also counter transactions, customer down payments, partial orders, and every other payment scenario your business runs. Each one carries its own data completeness risk, and Visa’s all-or-nothing merchant-level verification means a weak transaction type can drag down your entire account’s qualification status.

What Should Finance Leaders Be Asking About CEDP Readiness? 

If you are evaluating your CEDP position, the right starting point is not your payment processor’s dashboard. It is your order-to-cash process. 

Start by mapping where transaction data falls off. From quote to order to invoice to payment, track where line-item detail gets recorded and where it gets dropped. The gaps in that map are your CEDP risk. 

Counter transactions, customer down payments, and partial orders tend to carry less detail than standard invoiced sales—and they’re the transaction types businesses most often overlook when assessing their compliance position. 

Also look at how directly your ERP connects to your payment integration. If required fields need manual entry or aren’t mapped directly from your ERP, you’re relying on a process that produces inconsistent data at scale—and inconsistent data fails verification. 

Finally, know your Visa commercial card volume. The higher the volume, the higher the financial exposure of non-verification. That number helps you build the business case for closing gaps and prioritize where to start.

Visa CEDP compliance is an opportunity, not just a requirement 

CEDP is a compliance requirement. It’s also a forcing function for getting business data and payment data into genuine alignment—something most B2B teams have been putting off. 

Businesses that close that gap will not just qualify for better B2B interchange rates. They will have cleaner transaction records, better reporting visibility, and payment workflows that actually reflect how their business operates. That compounds over time. Better data means fewer reconciliation exceptions, more accurate cash flow visibility, and a stronger foundation for whatever payment requirements come next. 

The businesses that treat CEDP as a one-time fix will keep fighting this battle. The ones that treat it as a reason to modernize how operational data connects to payments will be in a meaningfully better position going forward, on costs, on efficiency, and on readiness.

Ready to Assess Your CEDP Readiness? 

Payment rates that depend on data quality aren’t a future problem. They’re on statements right now. If you want to know where your gaps are and what it would take to close them, talk to us. 

Talk to a Fortis Expert

What Workflow Commerce Requires and How Fortis Delivers 

Posted on by Chris Haldane

Read time: 6 minutes  

Workflow Commerce sets a higher bar than embedded payments. It requires payment infrastructure that doesn’t just sit inside a platform—it is designed to operate as part of the platform’s logic. That means interacting with invoices, customer records, credit terms, project accounting, and approval states in real time, not transmitting data after the fact and hoping everything lines up downstream. 

Most payment providers are built to clear transactions. Fortis is built to run the  workflows around them.

Built for B2B Workflows, Not Horizontal Commerce 

There’s an important architectural distinction between providers built for scale across many environments and providers built for depth inside specific ones. Horizontal platforms optimize for transaction volume and broad acceptance. That’s the right model for consumer commerce and high-volume ecommerce. It’s the wrong model for B2B workflow environments. 

Fortis was built specifically for ERP and business software platforms—the environments where receivables performance directly affects working capital, where billing complexity doesn’t fit a standard checkout model, and where a payment must interact with the operational system rather than simply clear the rails. 

That means our infrastructure works at the object level. Payment activity aligns directly with the ERP records and workflows that govern billing and reconciliation—invoices update, customer balances reflect accurately, project accounting adjusts—without a manual step in between. 

This matters most in industries where billing is genuinely complex: construction managing milestone payments and retainage, distribution reconciling across high invoice volumes, field services billing by project and contract terms, manufacturing and agriculture dealing with variable payment schedules and credit logic. These environments don’t need a better checkout. They need payment infrastructure that understands how the business actually operates.

What Workflow-First Architecture Actually Prioritizes 

Most payment architecture conversations start with acceptance—how many methods, how fast, how globally. Those are real considerations, but they’re not the right starting point for B2B workflow environments. 

A workflow-first architecture starts somewhere different: 

Receivables velocity: How quickly payments move from obligation to cash, without manual intervention slowing things down. 

Reconciliation accuracy: Whether payment activity lands correctly inside the ERP the first time, without exceptions to chase. 

ERP-native synchronization: Whether the payment system and the system of record are actually in sync, or just loosely connected. 

Workflow-aware automation: Whether business logic can drive payment behavior, or whether someone still has to manage it by hand. 

Financial visibility: Whether finance has a live, accurate picture of receivables, or a lagging one assembled from exports. 

These priorities change how integrations are built, how data is synchronized, and how payment logic interacts with billing logic. They also change what the technology is actually good for — and whether it can deliver the operational outcomes that Workflow Commerce is designed to produce.

An Architectural Position, Not a Feature Set 

Workflow Commerce isn’t a rebrand of embedded payments. It’s a different belief about what payments are for in a B2B context—that they should function as infrastructure inside operational systems, not as a transactional layer on top of them. 

Fortis is building around that belief. Not as a marketing position, but as an architectural one. The decisions we make about how integrations work, how data moves, and how payment logic interacts with ERP logic are all shaped by the same underlying conviction: in B2B environments, payment performance and operational performance are the same problem. 

The question that defined the last era of B2B payments was: can we accept digital payments? Most organizations can now. That’s no longer the differentiator. 

The question that defines this era is: are our payment workflows actually part of how the business operates? 

That’s the problem Fortis is built to solve. 

Why Manufacturing Finance Breaks Down—And How Fortis Fixes It 

Posted on by Chris Haldane

How manufacturing and engineering firms are closing the gap between commerce and cash—and why Fortis was recognized for leading the way. 

You’ve built a tight operation. Orders flow into your ERP. Fulfillment gets tracked. Invoices go out on time. But somewhere between “invoice sent” and “cash received,” things fall apart. 

Payments are still living in a separate system. Reconciliation is still manual. Your finance team is still chasing down settlement data that should already be in front of them. And every day that gap exists, it’s costing you in DSO, forecasting accuracy, and working capital you could be using to grow. 

This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a workflow problem—and it’s one of the most persistent challenges in manufacturing finance. That’s exactly why Fortis was named a 2026 FinTech Awards winner for Manufacturing and Engineering. 

The Disconnect Is Costing You More Than You Think 

When payments operate outside your ERP, your finance team becomes the integration layer—manually stitching together data that should flow automatically. The downstream effects compound fast: 

  • Invoice-to-cash cycles slow down, and AR drags 
  • Reconciliation across systems, entities, and locations becomes a weekly fire drill 
  • Cash position and settlement timing stay murky until it’s too late to act 
  • DSO climbs, forecasting suffers, and scaling gets harder 

For CFOs and finance leaders, this isn’t just operational friction— it’s a working capital problem hiding in plain sight. The root cause? The commerce workflow and the financial workflow aren’t talking to each other.

What Workflow Commerce Actually Looks Like 

The fix isn’t adding another tool to the stack. It’s embedding payments directly into the ERP systems your teams already use—so that orders, invoices, payments, and reconciliation operate as one connected workflow instead of four separate steps. 

When that happens, the full Workflow Commerce chain closes: 

Order → Fulfillment → Invoice → Payment → Reconciliation → Reporting 

That’s the shift manufacturers are making. And the results aren’t incremental—they’re structural.

Get Paid Faster—Without Changing How You Operate 

Embedding payments into your ERP doesn’t mean ripping out your existing systems. It means making them work harder. With payments inside the workflow, your teams can: 

  • Send invoices with embedded payment options—no portal-hopping required 
  • Accept ACH and commercial cards directly within ERP environments 
  • Reduce DSO and accelerate AR through automation, not more headcount 
  • See payment status and cash flow in real time—not after the close 

The result is a tighter connection between what you ship and when you get paid—with the visibility to manage cash flow proactively instead of reactively.

Why the Platforms You Rely on Are Evolving Too 

This shift isn’t just happening inside finance teams—it’s reshaping the ERP and industry software ecosystems that manufacturers depend on. The platforms serving manufacturing and engineering firms are under real pressure to embed payments natively, because their customers are demanding it. 

For software providers, embedding payments means delivering more complete workflows, reducing churn through deeper integration, and unlocking revenue tied directly to customer usage. It’s not a product roadmap decision anymore—it’s a competitive one.

Why Fortis—and Why Now 

Fortis was built specifically for the complexity of B2B commerce—ERP-native integrations, ACH and commercial card support, automated reconciliation, and real-time visibility into settlement and reporting. That’s not a feature list. It’s what Workflow Commerce looks like in practice. 

The 2026 FinTech Awards recognized Fortis in the Manufacturing and Engineering category for exactly this reason. Here’s what the judges said:

“Fortis is the clear winner in this category for addressing a fundamental inefficiency at the heart of manufacturing and engineering finance: the disconnect between payments and accounting systems. By embedding payment capabilities directly within ERP environments, Fortis transforms accounts receivable from a manual, error-prone process into a real-time, automated financial workflow. The resulting improvements in reconciliation speed, reporting accuracy, and working capital visibility deliver clear and measurable operational value. This deep integration of payments and accounting intelligence makes Fortis a standout winner at The FinTech Awards.”

Annabelle Whittall, COO, The Cloud Awards

The Bottom Line 

Manufacturing and engineering firms have always been good at building tight operations. The ones pulling ahead right now are the ones closing the last gap—connecting their commerce workflow directly to their financial outcomes. 

Payments aren’t a back-office function anymore. They’re embedded in how you sell, fulfill, and recognize revenue. And when they’re connected to your ERP—not bolted on beside it—cash flow accelerates, visibility improves, and your finance team can finally stop playing catch-up. 

Ready to see what Workflow Commerce looks like inside your ERP? Let’s talk. 

Workflow Commerce: The Next Operating Model for B2B Payments 

Posted on by Chris Haldane

Read time: 6 minutes 

If the problem in B2B payments isn’t checkout, then what is it?  

Over the past decade, the industry focused on transaction efficiency—and that focus made sense. Digital acceptance needed to happen. Payment methods needed to expand. Friction at the moment of payment needed to decrease. B2B payments needed to modernize, and they did.  

But as organizations modernized their payment rails, a different problem came into focus. The transaction improved. The workflow around it didn’t.  

Payments in B2B environments don’t exist in isolation. They originate in contracts, purchase orders, milestone schedules, and subscription agreements. They move through approvals, update ERP records, and influence reconciliation, reporting, and working capital decisions. And yet most payment systems still function as endpoints—discrete transaction tools sitting adjacent to the operational workflows they’re supposed to serve.

That’s the shift now taking shape. We call it Workflow Commerce.

What Is Workflow Commerce? 

In most B2B environments today, payments sit adjacent to the workflows that govern financial operations. They interact with ERP systems and billing platforms, but they don’t behave as part of them. Data passes between systems after the fact. Reconciliation happens in a separate step. Reporting lags behind what’s actually happening in receivables. 

Workflow Commerce changes the underlying assumption. Instead of asking how do we make this payment easier to complete, the question becomes how does this payment behave inside the system that governs invoicing, approvals, reconciliation, and reporting? 

In practice, that means a few things look different: 

  • Payment initiation is tied to workflow events—an invoice created, a milestone approved, a subscription renewed—rather than being a standalone action a customer takes. 
  • Payment activity interacts directly with ERP records in real time. Invoices update. Customer balances reflect accurately. Project accounting adjusts. No export, no manual match, no lag. 
  • Reconciliation happens within the same workflow that generated the obligation, not in a separate process downstream. 
  • Workflow logic, the rules that govern how the business operates, can be used to trigger follow-ups, retries, approvals, and dispute handling automatically, rather than requiring someone to manage exceptions by hand. 

None of these capabilities are entirely new in isolation. What’s new is treating them as a system, and recognizing that they only deliver real value when they work together.

Why This Is Happening Now 

Three forces are converging to push the market in this direction.  

ERP and vertical SaaS platforms have become the operational core of how B2B companies run. Billing, inventory, project accounting, financial reporting—it all lives inside structured systems of record. When payments operate outside that structure, the misalignment is no longer just inconvenient. It’s a measurable operational cost.  

Finance teams are under real pressure on receivables performance and working capital visibility. Getting paid faster matters. But if payment acceptance doesn’t connect to accurate reconciliation and forecasting, the downstream value is limited.  

And software platforms are competing on operational depth, not just features. Embedding a payment experience creates a monetization opportunity. Orchestrating the full financial workflow creates something harder to displace.  

When those three pressures converge, optimizing the transaction is no longer a sufficient answer. 

Digitization vs. Orchestration 

There’s a useful distinction worth drawing here.  

Digitization converts paper to pixels. It takes a manual process and makes it electronic. B2B payments have largely achieved this—checks gave way to ACH, invoices moved online, payment links replaced phone-in payments.  

Orchestration is something different. It’s about aligning systems so that activity in one part of the workflow automatically and accurately reflects in every other part. It’s not about converting a process. It’s about connecting them. 

Most B2B organizations have digitized their payments. Very few have orchestrated them. 

That’s the gap Workflow Commerce is designed to close—not by replacing what’s already working, but by making payments function as infrastructure inside the business rather than a layer on top of it. 

What Change When This Works 

When payments operate as part of the workflow rather than alongside it, the impact isn’t limited to the moment of acceptance. It runs through the entire financial lifecycle.  

Finance spends less time reconciling and more time analyzing. Receivables visibility is live, not lagged. Working capital decisions are based on accurate data. Operational teams aren’t waiting for the back office to catch up.  

And for the platforms that power these workflows, it changes the value proposition entirely. 

Embedded payments give customers a better way to pay. Workflow Commerce  gives them a better way to operate.   

The organizations that move from transaction optimization to workflow orchestration won’t just process payments more efficiently. They’ll fundamentally change how their businesses operate. 

Next: what it takes to actually build for this—and why the architecture matters. 

Embedded Payments in Field Service Software: Why Getting Paid Slows Down—and How Platforms Can Close the Gap

Posted on by Chris Haldane

How field service platforms can help accelerate time-to-payment, reduce collection friction, and improve the end-to-end customer experience

Getting paid quickly is one of the biggest challenges in field service. When invoices are delayed, payments aren’t collected on-site, or follow-up falls through the cracks, revenue lags behind the work being completed.  

In field service, the job isn’t done when the technician packs up. It’s done when the invoice is sent, the payment is collected, and the books are updated. And for too many field service businesses, that last mile takes longer than it should. 

60% of small businesses cite cash flow as a top concern. For service companies with mobile workforces and high job volume, delayed or missed collections aren’t just a finance problem—they’re an operational one. Every unpaid invoice sitting in a queue is revenue that’s been earned but not realized. 

Most solutions focus on technician behavior or internal processes. But increasingly, the ability to collect payment quickly is shaped by the field service platforms those teams rely on every day.

Speed Is Revenue—And Payments Are Part of the Workflow Now 

When embedded payments work the way they should in field service software, the entire dispatch-to-cash cycle tightens up. Technicians can collect payment on-site—tap-to-pay, mobile card reader, text-to-pay link—and the transaction flows directly into the platform. No manual reconciliation. No chasing down invoices after the fact. 

The downstream effects are meaningful: 

  • Faster invoice-to-cash cycles
  • Higher payment attachment rates at point of service
  • Better customer experience at job completion
  • Improved revenue predictability for the platform and its users
  • Incremental recurring revenue from payment processing 

In other words, accelerating time-to-payment and improving collection rates isn’t just about frontline execution—it’s driven by how seamlessly payments are embedded into the workflow. 

According to Ardent Partners, digital workflows can reduce invoice processing time by up to 50%. That’s not just an efficiency gain—it’s a direct improvement in cash flow velocity.

When Payments Stop Evolving, Growth Slows Down 

Most field service platforms that have embedded payments reach a point where things “work.” Transactions go through, users are onboarded, the integration is stable. But stable doesn’t mean optimized. 

Signs that a payments program may have plateaued: 

  • Limited visibility into what payments are contributing to platform revenue
  • Adoption that grew during rollout but hasn’t continued to improve
  • Mobile payment capabilities that lag behind the rest of the product experience
  • Payments managed as operational infrastructure rather than a strategic asset 

These patterns may seem incremental, but they show up in real ways—missed opportunities to collect in the field, more post-job follow-up, and a less consistent customer experience at the point of payment.  

These patterns tend to be gradual—which is part of what makes them easy to miss. The program isn’t broken, so it doesn’t get attention. But left unchecked, they quietly limit what the platform can achieve.

Knowing Where You Stand 

Evaluating a payments program means looking beyond transaction volume. The most effective embedded payments programs are built around a clear understanding of four dimensions: 

  • Revenue transparency: Do you have clear visibility into what your payments program is actually generating?
  • Merchant adoption depth: Are your users collecting payments in the platform, or working around it?
  • Integration flexibility: Can your payments layer keep up as the platform evolves?
  • Strategic alignment: Is payments part of how your team thinks about product and growth? 

When these areas aren’t aligned, the result isn’t just operational friction—it’s slower collections, inconsistent workflows in the field, and limited ability to scale efficiently. 

Most platforms lack a clear view across all four dimensions—creating a gap between what their payments program does and what it could deliver in the field. That gap, between functional and optimized, is where Fortis comes in. As a payments partner purpose-built for software platforms serving field service businesses, Fortis goes beyond processing to help teams evaluate their payments strategy, identify missed revenue opportunities, and build a roadmap for stronger performance across scheduling, invoicing, and collections. 

The result is a more collaborative, growth-oriented approach—one that moves beyond a vendor relationship to a true partnership.

The Bottom Line 

Salesforce research shows that 88% of customers say experience matters as much as product. In field service, payment collection is part of that experience—and friction at that moment leaves a lasting impression. 

The real opportunity isn’t just collecting payment—it’s enabling faster job completion, smoother customer interactions, and a more efficient path from work performed to revenue realized. 

The platforms pulling ahead in field services aren’t just better at scheduling and dispatch. They’re better at making the financial side of the job as seamless as the operational side. When payments are fast, easy, and embedded into the workflow, everyone wins: technicians close jobs faster, customers have a better experience, and the platform drives more revenue from the infrastructure it’s already built. 

Where to Go From Here 

If you’re curious how your payments program stacks up—or where the next layer of growth might be hiding—it starts with a conversation. Talk to a Fortis payments expert to explore what’s possible for your platform.