From Vendor Forms to Vendor Identity: PaymentWorks and the B2B Agentic Trust Layer

PaymentWorks recently made a significant upgrade to our software platform,  and it represents a critical milestone for achieving our ultimate vision for the Company.  

Every company maintains a vendor master database that stores all the identity information for each of its vendors required to 1) send purchase orders, 2) make payments, and 3) satisfy compliance requirements. Because it changes constantly—with new vendors being added and the information for existing vendors changing frequently—the quality of the information quickly becomes stale, introducing risk and downstream costs in the procure-to-pay process. The risks of not having a controlled process for managing this information have become apparent over the past decade, as fraudsters have succeeded in changing bank account details of existing vendors, redirecting millions of dollars to fraudulent accounts.

Those of us at PaymentWorks believed that every business would be better served by having a shared vendor master file (or “address book”)—where vendors maintain their information (or “profile”) in one place—and any changes to the information would be securely broadcast to their connected customers through the shared platform.  

In the early days, we told prospective customers that we aspired to be “the LinkedIn for businesses”.  Many of you may recall life before LinkedIn:  We would meet someone at a conference, collect a business card, and type their contact details into Microsoft Contacts.  We didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a cumbersome process because everyone’s contact details changed frequently, and the information was stored in a decentralized, standalone repository. But now we all share our contact information via a standardized LinkedIn profile.

It's hard to imagine for people not familiar with procurement or accounts payable, but that’s how every business currently maintains its vendor data.  Vendors complete a vendor form, and their info is manually keyed into a financial system and stored in a decentralized, standalone data repository.  

At PaymentWorks, we set out to create a shared communication network that would enable businesses to collect and maintain vendor profile information, ensuring it was accurate and timely, thereby streamlining commercial transactions and intra-company communications.  

Over the past ten years, we have done just that:  Our shared platform collects and maintains vendor profile information. Currently, our network has more than 1.5mm payees who are connected to our 300+ enterprise customers. By having this information on a centralized platform maintained by the vendor, our customers can send purchase orders and secure payments, however they (and their vendors) choose to exchange them - with (or without) an intermediary. THAT, very simply, is the end-state of a standard portable vendor record and the nirvana of procure-to-pay.  

This upgrade brings us closer to the ultimate vision of a “LinkedIn”- like experience for a shared vendor master file. When a vendor is invited by a customer to join PaymentWorks (and more than 50% of the time, they are already in the network), they simply create a PaymentWorks Profile and connect with new and existing customers on the network.  Any changes they make to their standard profile (for instance, when they change their headquarters address or bank) are communicated instantaneously to customers on the network—creating a portable vendor record shared across all their customers.  With PaymentWorks, the platform has unlimited scale with minimal process and technical friction for participating customers and their vendors. 

And, because we guarantee ACH payments made through the platform, customers can rest assured they are receiving accurate, up-to-date information for all the vendors in their vendor master file. Soon, the “vendor form” could go the way of the dodo.  

But the journey doesn’t stop there.  As the world quickly moves to agentic commerce — with agents executing purchasing decisions and consummating commercial transactions on behalf of companies and their suppliers—we believe a critical infrastructural component will be a ubiquitous “trust layer” (or shared database of authenticated businesses) to ensure counterparty authentication and authorization for commercial transactions. In that world, companies (and their agents) will require 100% confidence that a counterparty (“supplier”) is who they say they are, and the information required to execute secure business transactions can be trusted.  

In that world, collecting, maintaining, and verifying vendor profile information in an offline, manual manner won't be practical. It will be accessed in real time—through an independent third party (and process) that ensures trust—to execute and consummate commercial transactions in seconds, not weeks.  That world will be upon us soon, and with PaymentWorks 2.0, we are ready to support it.    

You can read our announcement here.

PaymentWorks