Strategic advice How to make payment technology a strategic capability in 2025

Digital payment technology generates large amounts of data, allowing company owners and executives to reduce one of their biggest risks: uncertainty.

“If the best thing is getting paid immediately, the second-best thing might be knowing when you’ll get paid,” says Robinson. “Most digital technologies, including payment technology, create data trails that allow executives to know more precisely how much cash will flow and when.”

Managing that uncertainty means you can better assess when you may need to dip into lines of credit to cover cash flow needs or when you’ll have excess cash you can use within the company for growth or other needs.

Using digital tools from Truist was key to Virginia-based O’Dorisio Carpentry & Concrete’s growth from $1 million to $10 million in revenue. Founder Daniel O’Dorisio gets real-time cash reporting on any digital device he uses, and automated deposits have sped up his cash flow.

“When you have the right technology and the right team, you can keep doing the work,” says O’Dorisio. “And I love doing the work.”

Your Truist relationship manager can help you explore opportunities to better manage your cash, including integrating digital financial tools.

One of the biggest challenges for businesses of any size is accurately recording and reporting critical accounting data, including cash inflows and outflows, and ensuring those are properly matched to transactions.

Financial technology will increasingly allow financial leaders to automate manual tasks. This might include automatically creating appropriate accounting entries for cash transactions, which not only saves time but can also reduce errors.

“As digital payments get integrated into the rest of a company’s accounting and finance systems, the amount of labor required for routine accounting is reduced,” says Robinson. “That means finance and accounting team members can be reassigned to more valuable tasks and company leaders can access critical financial information sooner.”

Using technology to guard against fraud can make it easier and simpler to do business with new clients—potentially increasing revenue. For example, more payment options embedded in the payment process create a smoother client experience when offering financing options.

Consider Amazon, which implemented its 1-Click ordering process as a way of streamlining checkout, meaning the user could take fewer steps from finding the item they wanted to purchasing it. The results were higher conversion rates, resulting in more revenue.²

Because payment technology has the ability to affect multiple aspects of your business, it’s important to have a solid idea of where to start. Your Truist relationship manager can help you identify areas where integrating new payment technology systems into your business may benefit you most. Here are three possibilities to consider.

While the number of commercial checks written each year continues to drop, data from the Federal Reserve shows the average value of those checks is rising—from $1,895 per check in 2019 to $2,685 in 2023.

Legacy processes and systems are typically slower, more expensive, harder to track, and more susceptible to error than modern digital payment systems. For companies still sending or receiving a lot of paper checks—and especially if the value of those individual checks is increasing—your Truist relationship manager can offer solutions to help you transition more of those transactions to digital forms.

No business can guarantee that they will be completely immune from fraudulent transactions. However, one way to protect your company is to implement risk scoring or AI tools to review and flag troublesome transactions more efficiently and effectively. Even the federal government has started using AI to prevent fraud.

Finally, consider where new payment technologies could support your company’s growth strategy. Some tactics might include accepting digital payments to make it easier for more customers to do business with you, automating financial processes to reduce errors and cut costs, strengthening efforts to attract and retain talent, or analyzing data collected through digital tools to better forecast your future cash position and use lines of credit more strategically.

As technology evolves throughout 2025 and beyond, your Truist relationship manager will continue to work with you at all stages of your business lifecycle to understand how to integrate payment technology into your business as a strategic capability that can make a bottom-line difference. With a range of solutions, it’s about matching your company’s needs with the technology at every stage that can improve your chances of success.