2023 Year in Review: Enhancing B2B Transactions from Start to Finish

At Balance, our mission is to bring global trade online. We want our technology to enable businesses to grow without limitations, empowered by efficient payment and financial processes. Our belief is that in order to tackle this mission, you have to look at the entire B2B transaction.

Over the last three years, we made significant progress toward our goal by investing in extensive market research and product development. 

Notably, in the past year alone, we introduced over 40 new features and products, spanning from payment acceptance to payment collection. 

All have played a major role in what we are proud to be officially announcing today.

Now, let's take a look at 2023 and the work that’s gone into a platform now equipped with more capabilities than ever, all designed to support your growth.

Empowering a B2B Network

In 2023, we experienced our strongest adoption and growth to date, with customers added across various industries and use cases. This led to us supporting a transaction network made up of over 100,000 business buyers and nearly 14,000 vendors.

A Comprehensive End-to-End Platform

The financial relationship with your customer begins long before their initial payment—during onboarding and continues through subsequent transactions. These interactions ideally culminate in a retained and loyal customer.

This is why it’s important to have an end-to-end payment platform, where every aspect of the transaction is solved cohesively, and all features collectively optimize the entire experience. 

For example, with our digital trade credit product, we enhanced the process from buyer application to collections. This involved introducing the pre-assessment feature to underwrite buyers at scale and launching a backup payment method to reduce overdue invoices.

This applied similarly to payments. We offered end-to-end support, starting with seamless pay-in processing. New features included faster ACH debit payments and the introduction of micro deposits. With the introduction of micro deposits, we enabled buyers to have an additional option to authenticate their bank accounts, without the need for direct bank connections or the requirement to enter sensitive bank credentials.

Balance has supported over 50 successful bank authentications for buyers paying via ACH and using micro deposits, across more than 18 different banks.

On the payout side, we developed features for efficient vendor payouts, including a comprehensive payout review page, improved communication through detailed vendor payout emails (merchant-branded), and automatic monthly reconciliation reports for vendors. In 2024, Balance merchants increased total payout volume by 83%.

This holistic approach is evident across our product and on the buyer side as well, which we'll explore next.

Enhancing the Buyer Experience

Emphasizing our core value of easy user experience, we incorporated feedback from hundreds of thousands of buyers to improve their experience. Over the past year, we delivered:

• The Buyer Portal: A convenient and centralized solution for buyers to access and manage their payment preferences, as well as outstanding and paid invoices.

• Revamped Checkout Experience: Designed to elevate your brand and increase checkout conversions.

• Unified Qualification Process: Catering to buyers of all sizes with one central credit application.

Establishing a Stronger Platform for the Industry

As a financial platform, safety, reliability, and compliance are central to our mission. One of the ways we did this was by expanding our team of risk and analysts, focusing on improving security and reliability for the entire ecosystem. We also made notable product improvements.

• Security: Crucial updates like MFA reinforced our commitment to providing a secure payment environment and dashboard.

• Compliance: We proudly announced our SOC 2 Type 2 certification, a significant step in meeting industry-leading security standards.

• Reliability: We implemented transaction-based rules, including Invoice confirmation for financed transactions and transaction review, to evaluate the risk for both parties.

Building with Strategic Partners

Mirakl, the leading marketplace and dropship platform, is trusted by some of the biggest brands worldwide, including Macy’s, Decathlon, Kroger, Airbus, and Toyota Material Handling. Together, Balance and Mirakl share a common vision of empowering B2B enterprises with the most advanced, secure and scalable technology to digitize through a marketplace model.

This year, we went beyond our support for pay-in capabilities and launched an integration that links Balance’s payout capabilities to the Mirakl invoicing system to automate thousands of invoices and payouts. We are actively working on further developments within the Mirakl ecosystem and are committed to strengthening our strategic partnership with Mirakl.

Looking Ahead to 2024

We remain committed to making Balance the most complete and user-friendly way to scale online transactions. Our 2024 roadmap includes the introduction of a new invoice page, split payments, and other exciting features. We're eager to share more details soon. Thank you for your trust and continued partnership. Here's to a fantastic 2024!