Embedded payments helped address a relatively straightforward problem in consumer commerce: remove the payment from the foreground of the customer experience. A passenger books a ride, completes the journey and leaves without separately initiating the payment.

Business-to-business (B2B) payments are different. The payment sits within a longer commercial process involving procurement, invoicing, approvals, liquidity, foreign exchange (FX), reconciliation and accounting. Embedding the transaction therefore solves only part of the problem.

That distinction emerged from the Sibos 2026 session, “From checkout to treasury: embedded payments go B2B”, where representatives from WorldFirst, BBVA, Visa and Federal Reserve Financial Services examined how embedded payments are moving deeper into corporate workflows.

The discussion pointed to a broader proposition: B2B embedded payments are moving from making a transaction easier to connecting payment execution with the financial and operational decisions surrounding it.

B2B payments become smaller and more frequent

Clara Shi, CEO of WorldFirst and Vice President of Ant International, said the composition of cross-border B2B payments is changing as smaller companies increasingly operate internationally.

WorldFirst processed $280 billion in total payment volume across more than 200 million transactions during the previous 12 months, she said, putting the average transaction at about $1,000.

Shi described smaller businesses operating internationally as “mini multinationals”. They increasingly need to collect and pay in multiple currencies and use bank transfers, cards, wallets and domestic payment methods alongside conventional cross-border transfers.

“For B2B, payment has to be embedded as part of the end-to-end solution to make SMEs' lives much easier,” she said.

Carmela Gomez Castelao, Head of Embedded Finance at BBVA, drew the distinction between embedding finance for consumers and companies more explicitly. With consumers, a financial service can be inserted into a customer journey. With companies, it has to fit into a business process.

That introduces questions about whether the company has sufficient cash, whether FX is required, who has authority to approve a transaction and how the person initiating it is identified. Risk, compliance and cyber controls therefore become part of the proposition.

The implication is that B2B embedded finance cannot simply reproduce the consumer checkout model. It has to understand the process in which the payment occurs.

SMEs and large corporates need different propositions

The discussion also highlighted why one embedded-payment model will not serve every business.

For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Shi described WorldFirst's approach as an integrated multi-currency account. Once onboarded, customers can access almost 40 local-currency collection accounts and collect through domestic payment rails. Balances can then be used for subsequent payments.

She said WorldFirst supports payouts in more than 100 currencies to more than 200 markets through bank accounts, cards and wallets, with FX incorporated into the service.

Large corporates present a different problem. They typically already have treasury, enterprise resource planning and financial systems, making integration more important than providing another standalone environment.

Shi said capabilities including electronic know-your-customer services and global disbursement could instead be made available through application programming interfaces (APIs). She said WorldFirst's infrastructure enables real-time payments in 24 currencies and same-day payments in 85 currencies.

This creates two paths to embedded finance. SMEs may need a more complete financial environment because they lack extensive treasury infrastructure. Large companies are more likely to want financial capabilities inserted into systems and workflows they already operate.

Payment routing becomes a decision

Once those connections are established, the next question is what intelligence sits on top of them.

Shi gave the example of WorldFirst's smart payout engine. A cross-border payment can potentially travel through several combinations of cross-border, domestic fast-payment and wallet networks. The engine considers factors including cost, speed, payment purpose and historical success rates to determine the route.

For one large e-commerce customer settling with hundreds of thousands of merchants every two weeks, Shi said the system handles disbursements across 21 markets and 11 currencies. She said the success rate reached 99.8% last year while costs declined 30%.

The example illustrates how embedded payments can evolve beyond connectivity. Providing access to multiple rails is one capability; deciding which rail best serves a particular transaction is another.

Castelao argued that APIs remain an essential foundation but are insufficient on their own. “An API is just a technical connection,” she said.

The layer above it increasingly needs intelligence about liquidity, FX and the underlying process, including the ability to determine when automation is appropriate and when human intervention remains necessary. “The proposition is the whole workflow,” she said.

FX moves closer to the commercial proposition

The same shift is occurring in FX. Instead of treating it solely as a cost or risk to be managed after a transaction is initiated, Shi described it as something that can be embedded into pricing and commercial decisions.

She said large platforms often still price primarily in dollars, while multi-currency and dynamic-pricing tools can allow companies to price locally and incorporate margins according to factors specific to an industry.

For airlines, for example, departure time, payment method and travel class could become inputs into local pricing. The same capability could support promotional campaigns.

“FX is no longer just a risk. It can become your revenue stream,” Shi said. She added that WorldFirst is working with six banks to serve more than 200 customers on this use case.

This extends the embedded-payments proposition beyond transaction processing. If FX can be incorporated into pricing before the payment is made, payments infrastructure begins to participate in the commercial decision itself.

Real-time payments change the treasury problem

Moving money continuously also changes the way companies have to manage liquidity.

Bernadette Ksepka of Federal Reserve Financial Services said 70% of payments through the FedNow Service, the US Federal Reserve's instant-payment service, are being made outside traditional banking hours, including evenings and weekends.

That reduces the relevance of an end-of-day approach to liquidity management. Companies and financial institutions increasingly need visibility and forecasting capable of supporting money movement around the clock.

This is where the discussion moved from embedded payments into intelligent treasury.

Shi described Ant International's Treasury Autopilot as a roadmap beginning with visibility. A multinational company may operate hundreds or even thousands of accounts, making timely aggregation of balances a prerequisite for subsequent automation.

She said Ant International has direct integrations with 150 banks and institutions to obtain account data. Its Falcon model is used to forecast FX and liquidity positions, while its Whale platform connects participating banks for real-time liquidity movement.

Shi said Whale works with 23 global banks and supports real-time fund movement in 24 currencies around the clock.

The progression is important. Account connectivity provides visibility. Data and models improve forecasting. Payment infrastructure provides the ability to act on those forecasts. Embedded payments then begin to become embedded treasury.

Scaling depends on the industry workflow

The panel also challenged the idea that scale comes simply from adding more payment capabilities.

Castelao argued that providers first need to understand the customer problem, define the complementary strengths of partners and align around the same customer outcome.

Shi pushed the argument further by emphasising industry-specific workflows. She pointed to healthcare in Asia Pacific, particularly China, where identification, appointments, fees and medicine purchases can be connected through a wallet, creating an end-to-end process.

In e-commerce, she said merchants may operate hundreds or thousands of stores across multiple marketplaces. The problem is not merely accepting or making payments, but measuring collections and payments for individual stores, linking accounts and pooling funds into a master account so that a finance team can manage them.

That suggests a different route to scale. B2B embedded payments become more valuable when payment, FX, reconciliation and liquidity are organised around the operating problem of a particular industry.

Embedded payments move from execution to decision-making

The Sibos discussion showed why the transition from consumer to B2B embedded payments is more than an expansion into another customer segment.

Consumer embedded payments largely remove friction from a transaction. Business payments sit within processes involving cash, FX, authority, reconciliation and liquidity. The more deeply payments are embedded, the more of that surrounding process financial providers must understand.

The infrastructure still has to move money safely and reliably. Increasingly, however, it must also determine which rail to use, support FX within pricing and commercial decisions, provide timely account information, anticipate liquidity requirements and interact with the systems through which companies run their businesses.

Embedded B2B payments are therefore moving beyond the checkout analogy that originally defined the concept.

The more significant transition is from embedding a payment into a workflow to embedding financial decision-making into the operation of the business.