Posted by Sarah Jordan

According to the 2007 AFP Electronic Payments Survey, underwritten by the Electronic Payments Network (EPN), checks are becoming a decreasingly dominant form of business-to-business payment. In 2004, businesses on average made 81 percent of their B2B payments by check. Whereas now, the average has dropped to 74 percent and businesses are increasingly adopting ACH, wire transfers, and card services.

The purpose of the survey was to identify U.S. business payment trends, the benefits gained from change, and the drivers and barriers to change. Among the barriers named by respondents, the top three were constraints of automatic information remittance , integration limitations, and customer resistance to electronic payments.

However, the benefits listed included lower transaction costs, better cash-flow predictability, and increased efficiencies with accounting systems. And with 43 percent of respondents saying that their organizations will likely adopt electronic payments within the next three years, the trend shows that the barriers to electronic payment implementation are being overcome.

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Technorati Tags: ACH, payment trends, electronic payments