Why Piers Gorman Says B2B Payments Are the Most Overlooked Lever in Digital Transformation

TreviPay's Piers Gorman on the expectation gap between buyers and sellers, the fraud landscape reshaping credit decisions, and why payments belong in the digital transformation conversation from day one.

In a recent episode of The B2B eCommerce Show, host Justin King sat down with Piers Gorman, Senior Vice President, APAC and EMEA, at TreviPay, the company that helps manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and marketplaces simplify B2B payments, invoicing, and trade credit across global markets. The conversation covered a range of issues that manufacturers and distributors face when modernizing their order to cash process, from the silent friction buyers experience after checkout to how artificial intelligence is reshaping both fraud prevention and growth.

What emerged from the discussion was a clear message: payments are not a back office function bolted onto digital transformation. They are part of the customer experience, and often the part that decides whether a buyer comes back.

The Expectation Gap Between Buyers and Sellers

Gorman's path to B2B payments runs through eight years in the British Army, a defense consultancy he helped build in Abu Dhabi, and stints across Cape Town and Singapore before landing in Melbourne with TreviPay. King then turned to what he called "this expectation gap in B2B e-commerce," asking where buyers and suppliers see the same transaction differently. Gorman's answer centered on friction.

"The consistent theme was the needs to reduce friction, right? To make it as seamless as possible for me to buy from you," said Piers Gorman, SVP APAC and EMEA, TreviPay.

That expectation, he explained, does not stop at the shopping cart. It carries through to how invoices are formatted, how purchase orders are matched, and how quickly a buyer's credit line reflects a payment that already cleared. Sellers who cannot meet those requirements are not losing on price or selection. They are losing because they made it hard to do business with them.

Why Finance Gets Left Out of the eCommerce Build

One reason the expectation gap persists, according to Gorman, is organizational. "The accounts receivable function is a finance function, right? It's seen as a protects the organization mechanism rather than a customer experience mechanism," said Gorman. "We sometimes get characterised as just another payment method, like accepting a card," he said. "It's a much more complex, positively complex engagement. We need to be thought of as if we're the in-house accounts receivable team of that client."

What Bad Friction Actually Looks Like

Gorman pointed to payment application as one of the more painful, hidden bottlenecks in B2B commerce. A single invoice might carry hundreds of line items tied to dozens of child accounts, and applying that payment correctly can take weeks. Meanwhile, the buyer's credit line stays frozen even though the money has already moved. "You can't spend because your credit limit has been blocked because they pay the money but it's just not been applied," he said.

Composable Commerce Needs a Payments Layer

As more manufacturers and distributors move toward composable commerce, assembling best-of-breed tools for search, content, and checkout instead of relying on one monolithic platform, payments increasingly function as connective tissue rather than a single checkout step. TreviPay's job is to make that feel like one coherent relationship from both directions, simple for the buyer and manageable for the seller.

Identity, Credit, and the Fraud Problem Hiding in Checkout

Extending credit to an unknown buyer arriving from a browser is its own challenge. TreviPay's answer is heavy investment in real-time identity verification and credit decisioning, fast enough in some markets to approve a new applicant and extend a credit line up to $100,000 in under 30 seconds. Research from BNY found that the share of identity fraud attempts classified as advanced nearly tripled in a single year, from about 10 percent in 2024 to 28 percent in 2025.

Localization Is Not Optional for Global Expansion

Almost everything related to payments has to localize. Currency, compliance regimes, credit data sources, and even preferred payment methods all vary by country. TreviPay still processes roughly 100,000 checks per quarter in the United States, compared with Australia, where checks are not accepted at all. Europe's real-time payments infrastructure is well ahead of both markets. "You need to offer the payment methods to your customers that make sense in that country. Otherwise you're buying April versus your competition," said Gorman.

Where AI Fits Into B2B Payments

Most of the industry's current AI investment is defensive, aimed at fraud prevention. TreviPay is taking a parallel approach with a tool called the Growth Center, which applies AI to spend pattern analysis so the company can flag buyers who appear to be reducing their activity before that decline becomes a lost account. "AR doesn't need to be a cost center. It can be a value add to the business, not just a protection mechanism, a lever to unlock growth," Gorman said.

What Practitioners Should Take From This

For digital leaders at manufacturers and distributors, Gorman's advice was less about adopting new technology and more about organizational alignment. The eCommerce channel tends to set the pace for a company's broader digital transformation, which means it needs buy-in from finance, operations, and leadership rather than treating payments as someone else's problem to solve later.

The Long Arc of Modernizing B2B Payments

Gorman closed with a reminder that B2B is not a single, uniform buyer base. "The workshop manager still wants to fill in a paper docket," he said. "And you have to be educated for that. But you also want to deal with the young guy that's joined a sister business that only knows his phone." Suppliers need to serve both ends of that spectrum at once, and do it at pace.