Growth alone no longer earns a premium in B2B payments. Owners now have to prove that their revenue will last.
B2B payments still have a long runway, but investors have stopped paying for volume alone. The companies that earn premium valuations will be the ones that can show which revenue lasts.
B2B payments still have a long runway. Checks fell from 81 percent of business-to-business payments in 2004 to 26 percent in 2024, according to the Association for Financial Professionals, which leaves a quarter of the market still on paper. Business ACH payments rose almost 10 percent in 2025, to 8.1 billion payments worth about $63 trillion, according to Nacha.
Yet investors no longer pay for that volume the way they once did. BCG’s 2026 Global Payments Report finds payments companies trading about 25 percent below their 10-year average valuations, with total shareholder returns of minus 6 percent over four years against 20 percent for the S&P 500.
For a sponsor or a CEO, the message is that growth alone no longer earns a premium. Owners now have to prove that their revenue will last.
Growth driven mainly by processing volume earns less credit, because clients increasingly route transactions by price and service and can swap providers. Acquirers and traditional processors are most at risk.
Revenue tied to deeper engagement, such as several products attached to each transaction, network effects, and end-to-end workflow, commands a premium. The top vertical software companies that also process payments trade at about 2.8 times the multiples of traditional processors.
With slower market growth and fewer large deals, investors can now tell which companies are taking share and which are losing it, and which growth was bought.
A B2B payments business earns from two sources that behave very differently. Transaction and processing fees scale with volume and form the durable base. Float, the interest earned on funds in transit, is smaller in revenue but falls almost entirely to profit, so it drives year-to-year swings in earnings.
McKinsey estimated that interest income, including what banks earn on account balances, made up 46 percent of global payments revenue in 2024, and it expects that income to grow only about 2 percent a year through 2029 as rates fall. In a rate-cutting cycle, float income falls even when volume grows, and counterparties increasingly negotiate a share of it.
The mix within fees is shifting too. As ACH outgrows cards in B2B, less revenue comes from interchange and more from per-transaction fees, float, and the software and workflow around each payment. McKinsey notes that most digital B2B activity runs through low-margin channels such as bank transfers, so companies are investing in invoice automation, reconciliation, and working-capital tools to capture value.
Payments networks have two sides, and the economics of two-sided markets, pioneered by Jean Tirole and Jean-Charles Rochet, show that who pays matters as much as how much. In B2B, card fees usually fall on the payee, which gives suppliers a built-in reason to push their customers toward ACH or checks. A pricing change on one side of the network can move volume on the other.
In B2B networks, churn rarely leaves one end user at a time. A short list of large intermediaries, such as major suppliers, payers, processors, and software partners, each controls a large block of volume, and a decision by any one of them can move volume across many clients at once.
Growth can jolt the network as well: onboarding a large new client exposes existing counterparties on the other side to new volume and default terms, and their reactions spread. As counterparties consolidate, pricing moves from posted rates to negotiated ones and take rates compress.
Payments companies increasingly face forces outside their control that erode margin: falling rates, price-based routing, consolidating counterparties, and pressure on fees. To keep growing, they need product and relationship innovation that wins new and stickier revenue streams to offset those forces. That starts with knowing their customers: segmentation and related analyses that show which clients value which products, which are at risk, and where the next product or a deeper relationship will pay off.
Measurement is only the start. The analytics that pay off are the ones tied to actions the business can take. For a B2B payments business, those include:
In one payments business we worked with, we measured churn, analyzed its drivers, and found that payment volume growing too quickly was what led clients to leave. We identified the growth thresholds beyond which churn became likely and built live early-warning lists that the company embedded into its operations, so teams could throttle payments and engage more closely with the client in question before it left.
Sequence large client launches by forecasting how existing counterparties on the other side will react, and prepare outreach before volume shifts.
Model earnings under different rate paths, and prioritize contract terms on float sharing and funds in transit before renewals come due.
Identify which clients use only one product, and target the additional products and workflow features most associated with retention.
Transaction data sits in processing systems, contract terms in CRM and legal files, float in treasury, and client activity in product logs, each with its own definitions, and each acquired business adds more. The first step is a governed data foundation: a semantic layer and a shared model of clients, counterparties, contracts, and transactions that holds across both sides of the network.
The second step is economics. That means separating fee, interchange, and float revenue per dollar of volume; tracing how a change on one side of the network moves volume on the other; and estimating how much of growth is organic. A dashboard is only the last step, the place where that work becomes visible to the people who act on it.
The same foundation also changes who can do the analysis. With clear data governance in place, defining who owns each data domain, who stewards its definitions and quality, and who maintains the systems as custodian, product, operations, and finance teams no longer have to queue every question behind IT. A well-built semantic layer, AI tools that work against it, and the right training let them build the analytics they need, while IT concentrates on keeping systems reliable and available.
The B2B payments companies that earn premium valuations will not be the ones that processed the most volume. They will be the ones that can show which revenue lasts, which counterparties could move it, and what they are doing about both.
A short conversation is enough to see which of these measures your data can support today, and where the foundation needs work.
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