About PaymentWorks

It began with a question PaymentWorks co-founder and CEO Thayer Stewart received from a previous accounts payable client in 2012: “Why isn’t there a shared address book in the cloud for every company?”

After decades of working with suppliers, that question hit Thayer like a lightning bolt.

Imagine if, when you wanted to post news on LinkedIn, you had to post your update to each individual connection specifically. What if it were the same on Facebook, Instagram, or any social experience where you might have hundreds or thousands of connections?

Communicating your news would be so troublesome that you likely would not bother.

Thayer immediately understood that this was a challenge for all suppliers everywhere. Suppliers might have hundreds or thousands of customers, and anytime they needed to communicate something new, such as a new remit address, a change of legal identity due to a merger or acquisition, or new banking details, they had to do it one-to-one.

A supplier onboarding platform that could update all customers simultaneously did not exist.

An idea was born.

Thayer asked his co-founder Alan Greenblatt, “What if we build a LinkedIn-like platform for vendors to connect with their customers?”

And more: What if this platform also verifies the vendor information so that the customer doesn’t have to? So they can trust what is being input? Think of the time, energy, and risk saved when you have clean vendor data. Think of this radically improved vendor experience: update once and push to all customers!

The idea was straightforward: Securely store all vendor information in the cloud across all businesses so nobody would ever have to manually enter forms, verify credentials, or doubt who they were paying again. And, oh, make it so anyone could use it with any ERP.

If customers could trust the identity of the vendors they do business with, payments would be easy.

Payments would work.

PaymentWorks.

Forty-eight hours later, they got to work building it.