The opportunity for progress in B2B payments has never been hard to spot. Trillions of dollars still move through processes built on paper checks, manual reconciliation and disconnected workflows that digital tools never fully replaced. Change has arrived, but slowly, and usually at the margins. PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster summed up that inertia at the start of a dynamic conversation with Raj Seshadri, who leads commercial and new payment flows at Mastercard, recalling that analyzing the space a decade ago “was a little bit like watching paint dry because there wasn’t a lot of innovation.” Seshadri didn’t disagree. Instead, she focused on what’s different now and why this moment feels more consequential than previous attempts to modernize the space. What has changed, she said, isn’t just technology. It’s pressure. A tighter macro environment has made inefficiency harder to tolerate. Float is no longer a nice to have. It’s a drag on working capital. Slow settlement and fragmented cash visibility are no longer manageable inconveniences. They are operational risks. As Seshadri put it, companies are now under pressure to “really optimize cash flow, working capital expenses and the capacity to invest.” We’re seeing an inflection point, and payments happen to be right at the center of it all. They touch procurement, payables and receivables, yet often sit across systems that do not communicate well with each other. Advertisement: Scroll to Continue CFOs who once treated payments as a back-office function are now taking a hard look at their payments infrastructure and the way it directly impacts liquidity and investment capacity. Fraud Is Not Just a Tech Problem At the same time, fraud has become more persistent and more complex. Treating it as a technology issue misses the bigger picture, said Seshadri. The tools matter, but the underlying challenge is trust between