For most large B2B merchants in Asia-Pacific, card payments represent a fraction of their receivables — typically under 4% of total B2B sales volume. The reasons are familiar: cards are perceived as expensive, MDR is visible in a way that invoice financing costs are not, and the status quo of trade credit and bank transfers has inertia behind it. But that perception is increasingly at odds with what merchants who actually accept cards are reporting. A growing body of primary research — including surveys and interviews across APAC's largest merchant segments — tells a different story: one where card acceptance generates measurable, quantifiable benefits that in many cases significantly outweigh the cost of acceptance.
The Challenge
Large B2B merchants in APAC face a set of structural payment challenges that are often invisible in aggregate but deeply costly at the line-item level: bad debt and write-offs averaging 168 basis points of revenue, third-party financing costs for working capital management, expensive exceptions handling for problem invoices, and long days-sales-outstanding cycles that tie up liquidity. The question a global payments network needed to answer was precise and commercially urgent: can card acceptance credibly address these pain points, and if so, by how much — and for whom? Making that case to large B2B merchants required not general advocacy for card payments, but a rigorous, primary-research-backed quantification of the specific benefits that card acceptance delivers in the APAC context.
The Approach
KoreFusion conducted a comprehensive APAC B2B merchant research program as part of a larger global study spanning over 2,800 survey-based questionnaires and more than 200 qualitative interviews across 37 markets in Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. The APAC component drew on responses from 1,000 large merchants, including 248 that already accepted card payments, across the region's major economies. The research quantified seven distinct benefit categories from card acceptance — each measured as a percentage of total revenue at 100% card volume: incremental sales from accessing previously unreachable buyers (214 bps); reduced bad debt and write-offs (106 bps); improved cash flow through accelerated DSO reduction (48 bps); reduced third-party financing cost (51 bps); tax savings on MDR (45 bps); inflation-based savings from accelerated cash conversion (9 bps); and operational improvements in BAU acceptance and exceptions handling (3 bps combined). Net of MDR, the analysis found that card-accepting merchants reported net benefits of 277 basis points of total revenue — and a net profit improvement of up to 52 basis points — at 100% card volume. The research also documented behavioral trends: 50% of existing card-accepting merchants reported growing their card receivables over the past three years, with sales growth, DSO reduction, and bad debt reduction cited as the primary drivers of intent to expand acceptance further.
The Outcome
The research delivered a compelling, data-driven case for B2B card acceptance that reframed the merchant conversation from cost to value. For non-accepting merchants, the analysis demonstrated that the expected gross benefit of 475 basis points substantially outweighs the MDR cost, with incremental sales and bad debt reduction alone more than justifying adoption in most large merchant contexts. For existing card acceptors, the findings validated their experience and provided a structured framework for communicating the full return on acceptance to CFOs and treasury teams — beyond the sales uplift they already recognized. The APAC executive presentation gave the network's commercial and merchant acquiring teams a rigorous, regionally specific tool for merchant engagement, structured around the seven benefit categories that B2B merchants in the region find most commercially compelling.