Corporate Culture and Payments Technology

Corporate culture is a trending topic in executive circles. Aside from driving employee engagement and attracting and retaining top talent, a healthy corporate culture has been strongly linked to financial performance. It’s the “personality” of an organization, guiding employee behavior and helping to define the workplace environment itself.

A forward-thinking corporate culture serves a company’s rise toward innovation—and in B2B corporate payments, that means promoting technology’s role in operations.

Tech Adoption Requires Cultural Support

In the B2B payments universe, technology is helping accounting and finance organizations transition from paper to electronic processes. Trends point to increases in the adoption of new B2B new payment forms like real-time payments, mobile payments, and virtual credit cards. Companies are realizing the benefits of more streamlined workflows, more satisfied customers/suppliers, and higher quality data.

Change is happening slower for others. Participants in The Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study, The Digital Dividend: First-Mover Advantage, reported that the main reason for not adopting new technologies was cultural resistance to change, suggesting that “legacy culture” can be just as limiting as legacy technology. Indeed, technology can be disruptive and building a business case isn’t always so easy. But technology is continually changing how employees communicate with each other and impacting the ways organizations transact with business partners. This is pushing more decision-makers on board.

When technology itself is used to support a company’s culture—that is, help the company achieve its goals and carry out its mission—the technology/culture connection is solidified. Market research from Alcatel-Lucent, as reported in Technology and Corporate Culture: A Combination that can Drive Bottom Line Results, reveals that 82% of “cultural gurus” say there is a connection between IT tools, services and policies, and company culture, versus 11% of others. Further, progressive leaders integrate technology into the day-to-day workplace experience. These habits are among those adopted by highly successful companies:

• Put mobile technology at the hands of their employees
• Leverage employees’ personal technology
• Use IT to equip workers with useful tools and drive a healthy culture

Purpose-Driven Payments Technology

Company leaders in the B2B payments space are at different places along the path to embracing next-generation technology—and that’s dependent largely on their company’s culture. Slowly or swiftly, they’re moving away from manual processes and introducing their teams to new technologies. By extending their departments’ capabilities, they’re doing more than automating processes and becoming more efficient while managing data: they’re also demonstrating a cultural shift. They’re creating a corporate culture that views technology as an asset to the payments process. They’re giving value to innovation—and using innovation to create more value.

For further reading on the topic of corporate culture and payments, see:

PYMNTS.com: The Corporate Culture of Earnings Manipulation
Forbes Culture: Why It’s the Hottest Topic in Business Today