For most large B2B merchants, card payments still represent a small fraction of total receivables, with suppliers and buyers defaulting instead to bank transfers, invoicing, and trade credit. Yet merchants who do accept cards increasingly report that the benefits of acceptance more than offset the cost of doing so. A leading global payments network engaged KoreFusion to quantify, at global scale and with regional precision, exactly how much value card acceptance creates for large B2B merchants, and why.
The Challenge
Large B2B merchants face a familiar set of structural payment pain points: bad debt and write-offs, the cost of third-party financing tools used to manage working capital, expensive handling of problem invoices, and long days-sales-outstanding cycles that tie up liquidity. Card acceptance among large B2B merchants remains low worldwide, but adoption, cost structures, and merchant attitudes toward cards vary meaningfully from region to region. The payments network needed a rigorous, regionally nuanced answer to a commercially urgent question: can card acceptance credibly address these pain points, by how much, and for whom, in each part of the world where it does business.
The Approach
KoreFusion conducted a global B2B merchant research program spanning nearly 2,900 survey-based interviews and well over 100 qualitative deep-dive interviews with large merchants across dozens of markets in Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa. The research quantified a consistent set of benefit categories, including incremental sales, reduced bad debt, reduced third-party financing costs, improved cash flow, tax savings, and operational efficiencies, for each region, while capturing the distinct differences in card acceptance rates, firm size, and industry mix that shape how those benefits play out locally.
The Outcome
The research produced a compelling, data-driven, region-by-region case for B2B card acceptance that reframes the merchant conversation from cost to value. Across the regions studied, large merchants accepting cards for B2B payments reported measurable upside to pre-tax and after-tax profitability as card volume increased, with the specific scale of benefit varying by region, reflecting differences in existing acceptance levels and market dynamics. The findings gave the payments network's regional commercial and merchant acquiring teams a rigorous, consistent framework for engaging large merchants on the full return of card acceptance, and supported companion thought-leadership whitepapers built on the same research to extend the message to merchants, acquirers, and processors across the broader card ecosystem.