Accounting/receivables platform Autobooks has acquired consumer bill pay solutions provider Allied Payment Network.
The deal, announced Tuesday (May 6), is designed to add business bill pay capabilities to Autobooks platform, which in turn lets financial institutions offer small businesses a solution for things like accepting payments, paying vendors and accessing working capital.
“Financial institutions want to deliver more value to their business customers — and they want to do it within the banking experience. By acquiring Allied Payments, we’re bringing together receivables, payables and accounting in a way that’s never been done before,” Steve Robert, CEO of Autobooks, said in a news release.
“This is more than a product expansion — it’s the next step in our mission to help financial institutions compete by offering small businesses the tools they need to succeed.”
By integrating Allied Payments’ bill pay infrastructure, the release added, financial institutions can now support both the payable and receivable sides of the money movement equation, while offering businesses built-in accounting and cash flow tools.
The acquisition comes at a time when — as PYMNTS wrote recently — B2B FinTech firms are developing solutions designed to meet the unique challenges facing small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). This has not only opened up a vast, underpenetrated market, that report said, but also sparked a new wave of innovation in financial infrastructure.
“SMBs are the beating heart of the economy, but they’ve traditionally been treated like an afterthought when it comes to financial services and other innovative product offerings,” PYMNTS wrote. “But recent advances in open banking, AI-driven underwriting and application programming interface (API)-first architectures have made it both feasible and profitable for FinTechs to target SMBs at scale.”
Financial institutions have historically struggled to serve SMBs for a variety of reasons. Unlike consumers, SMBs have a wide range of business models, cash flow patterns and credit profiles. And unlike large enterprises, they don’t have the dedicated finance teams or the volume to justify custom solutions. This “messy middle” has stranded SMBs in a no-man’s land — too complicated for retail banking, too small for corporate.
“As the macro backdrop shifts, this no-man’s land could become deadly for SMBs. The most recent core finding from the latest PYMNTS Intelligence report reveals a stark reality: one in five SMBs without access to financing fear they may not survive ongoing tariff-related cost increases,” the report added.
“These businesses, often viewed as the backbone of the U.S. economy, are being squeezed between the rising cost of goods and limited financial buffers, highlighting systemic weaknesses in capital accessibility across the sector.”
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