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Innovative accounts receivable platforms are helping streamline AR workflows while leveraging AI and empowering AR teams to better understand and serve their business buyers. These providers move substantial payment volumes, with some moving trillions in payment volume annually. There are six key trends transforming accounts receivable and several providers that are driving the change.
The Take
The accounts receivable market is undergoing rapid transformation driven by advancements in AI, the need for improved cash flow management, and the desire among AR teams for integrated, embedded experiences. Many AR platform providers are broadening their operational efficiency value propositions, such as reducing days sales outstanding. Providers are also positioning themselves as financial operations management platforms that can predict and manage cash flow and identify revenue-generating opportunities. The result is a shift from reactive receivables management to proactive, data-driven revenue orchestration.
Context
The accounts receivable market is undergoing a rapid transformation from a back-office function to a strategic driver of cash flow and growth. Historically, manual processes like collections and invoicing are becoming more automated and predictive, yet many businesses still struggle with managing financial tasks.
According to a study conducted by 451 Research by S&P Global, 50% of businesses agree that they rely too much on manual, non-automated processes for managing financial tasks. As a result, there is demand for technology and providers that can help streamline tedious financial operations.
A streamlined receivables process can accelerate cash flow, improve customer relationships and reduce errors. Further, a high accounts receivable AR turnover ratio, a measure of how quickly a company can convert credit sales to cash, is a key performance indicator that can contribute to investor confidence and positively impact company valuations.
Key trends
AR is moving from a cost center to a strategic growth lever.
Accounts receivable workflows are maturing beyond tracking down outstanding invoices and monitoring at-risk accounts. While collections remains an important part of AR, AI/machine learning can now predict when buyer spending is expected to slow, help identify “power spenders,” cross-sell opportunities, and develop effective strategies for driving conversions based on learned buyer behavior. This transforms AR into a more strategic function, evolving it from a cost center to a revenue generator. Multi Service Technology Solutions Inc., (doing business as TreviPay) for example, announced its AI-Powered Growth Center in February, which analyzes buyer behavior to identify growth opportunities. Meanwhile, Fidelity National Information Services Inc. unveiled FIS Revenue Insight in 2025, its predictive analytics offering aimed at helping businesses optimize collections. This shift enables AR teams to directly influence revenue outcomes, rather than solely minimizing losses.
AR is bridging sales and finance teams.
As AI learns buyer behavior, identifies “power spenders” and predicts when account activity is expected to slow, this bridges traditional silos between the finance and sales teams. AR automation software is increasingly integrating with customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to provide greater visibility into quotes, purchase orders and invoices. When AR teams identify early signs of account dormancy, sales teams can proactively offer incentives and drive engagement to retain revenue and enhance the customer relationship. Leading AR platforms are beginning to position their offerings as sales enablement tools rather than just operational efficiency engines. This alignment positions AR as a shared source of truth for both revenue generation and risk management.
Agentic AI is beginning to transform AR workflows and offer predictive insights.
AI in AR is moving beyond task automation, such as invoice matching, toward autonomous execution of end-to-end workflows. For example, creating and sending invoices to customers has historically been a manual task. AI is increasingly being used to help automate this process by extracting order details from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, populating invoice templates and emailing invoices automatically. Agentic AI has the potential to take this even further. Instead of automating the invoice delivery process, an AI agent can monitor delivery confirmations, cross-check data across systems, generate a personalized email in the correct format, track if the invoice has been opened and alert AR teams or send through a more effective channel if the invoice remains unopened. This is a much more proactive process that enables AR teams to take on more strategic planning and activities. Access this report for more details on AI applications for AR teams.
While many AR platform providers use AI in their offerings, agentic AI in AR is still in early days. BTRS Holdings Inc. and HighRadius Corp. are two providers with strong agentic AI capabilities. HighRadius, for example, orchestrates 180-plus agents across accounts receivable workflows with plans to a fully autonomous — where it defines at least 90% of a process is automated using AI — product suite by 2027. BillTrust announced its Collections Agentic Procedures in November 2025, which uses AI agents to segment customers and recommend the most effective communications for payment reminders by learning and adapting to changing customer behavior. Additionally, it launched Agentic email to enable AR teams to manage inboxes, prioritize tasks and draft personal responses. BillTrust plans to announce additional agentic capabilities later this year.
Enhancing the buyer experience is emerging as a critical opportunity.
Reducing days sales outstanding and accelerating invoice-to-cash are primary objectives for AR teams. Friction in the buyer’s payment experience can delay payment, and as a result, there is a greater industry effort to enhance the buyer payment experience. Accepting a variety of payment methods at checkout, offering flexible payment terms, and promoting supplier/buyer engagement through shared, collaborative portals are a few ways accounts receivable providers are delivering value to both suppliers and their business buyers. TreviPay, for example, enables suppliers to extend branded trade credit to their business buyers. Versapay Corp. offers a collaborative portal where suppliers and their business buyers can view invoice details in real time, send messages and resolve issues. Increasingly, AR platform providers are enhancing buyer experiences as part of their value propositions. This not only streamlines the buyer experience and helps accelerate payment — it improves the buyer-supplier relationship.
Integrated, embedded experiences are becoming essential.
Businesses often use a variety of platforms and providers for their operations, such as ERPs, payment processors and banks. This can obscure cash flow visibility and create integration challenges. Improving integration with business systems (ERPs/CRMs) is a top commercial payment initiative indicated by 42% of businesses globally, according to a 451 Research from S&P Global Energy Horizons and Discover Global Network 2025 commercial payments survey. Increasingly, businesses want a single pane of glass to view and manage their financial operations. Over half (51%) of businesses surveyed globally say their organization is very interested in accessing expense management capabilities and supplier invoice details through a single platform. Similarly, over half (58%) of businesses could envision using payment processing and bank accounts from their commercial payments software providers. This is driving commercial payments providers to support a variety of business needs, shifting from stand-alone tools to integrated financial operating systems.
Some AR providers are expanding beyond AR and offering complementary capabilities, such as supplier-branded trade credit for buyers at checkout, dashboards and analytics for AR teams, and even payment processing to add value and create a sticky value proposition. For example, providers such as BillTrust and Versapay operate as payment facilitators and can pass on reduced interchange fees.
Buyer-supplier networks are becoming a key competitive advantage.
AR platform providers that can help AR teams get paid faster while removing friction for their business buyers are sitting on a gold mine: a network of buyers and suppliers and their transactions. An AR provider can learn buyer behavior that it can then leverage across its network to help suppliers. For example, if a buyer has enabled autopay with a supplier, it can empower other suppliers to offer autopay. This can work both ways. A supplier can proactively serve buyers according to their preferences, or buyers with sufficient bargaining power can encourage their other suppliers to use a particular platform or feature for invoicing and receiving payment. This not only improves the customer experience, but it can also organically help scale AR platforms. As the network grows, AR platforms using AI improve their models. Leveraging buyer-supplier data is a budding opportunity that leading AR platforms are beginning to capitalize on to better serve customers, improve their models and scale their operations.
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