The news: The card network rolled out American Express Global Pay, a digital solution that lets US businesses make domestic and cross-border business-to-business (B2B) payments directly from the Amex app, per a press release.
All eligible US Amex Small Business Card members can send payments funded by their business bank accounts to suppliers in more than 40 countries across a range of currencies.
Why this can succeed: Amex Global Pay can streamline B2B payments and meet B2B payment preferences.
Zooming out: Amex has strengthened its B2B offerings with several recent partnerships.
The key takeaway: Amex’s push into digital B2B payments can grow volume for the network and issuer as more SMBs digitize. Eighty-two percent of SMBs in the US and Canada changed how they transmit money—and just more than half transitioned clients to digital methods at the onset of the pandemic, according to an August 2020 Mastercard study.
All-in-one solutions like what Amex is striving for can be attractive to these smaller merchants and opens up the card network to a massive volume opportunity: US B2B payments transaction value is expected to hit $28.611 trillion in 2022, per Insider Intelligence forecasts.
Related content: Read our US B2B Payments report to learn more about the digitization of the industry and where it’s headed next.