Global Fintech Interview with Nathan Shinn, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of BillingPlatform

Nathan Shinn, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of BillingPlatform discusses the top trends impacting the global payments landscape in this Global Fintech Series interview:

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Hi Nathan, we’d love the top highlights of your new BP Pay solution and how it enables businesses and individual users?

BP Pay simplifies and strengthens how enterprises manage payments. By embedding payment processing natively within BillingPlatform, we eliminate the need for third-party gateways—reducing complexity, cost and risk.

With pre-configured workflows, PCI compliance handled by our processor, and rapid onboarding, companies can go live quickly while gaining real-time visibility into payment operations. BP Pay delivers faster time-to-value, stronger cash flow and a better user experience—for finance teams and customers alike.

Read More on Fintech : AI in Financial Services: Priorities and Trends for Leadership

How are business payments, especially digital payments evolving today, and what top fintech and paytech trends are impacting this space?

We’re seeing a fundamental shift in how enterprises approach payments—not just as a back-office function, but as a strategic lever for improving cash flow, customer experience and operational agility.

Three trends are shaping this evolution:

1. Embedded Payments
   Companies want payment capabilities directly integrated into their core platforms—billing, ERP or CRM—so they can manage everything in one place. It’s about reducing friction, eliminating point integrations and giving finance teams more control and visibility across the payment lifecycle.
2. Operational Risk and Compliance Pressures
   With data security and compliance mandates like PCI DSS becoming more complex, many businesses are moving toward payment solutions that offload that burden. Processors and platforms that handle compliance natively are becoming increasingly attractive, especially for companies that want to scale without building large payments teams.
3. Customer Expectations and Experience
   B2B buyers now expect the same payment convenience and transparency they’re used to in B2C—real-time status updates, self-service portals and multiple payment options. Businesses that don’t modernize their payment experience risk falling behind both in efficiency and customer retention.

Overall, the pressure is on to make payments faster, more transparent and easier to manage—not just for the customer, but for the business too.

Can you share a few thoughts on how modern fintech innovators are using AI to drive modernization in digital business payments?

Modern fintech innovators are using AI not as a standalone feature but as an embedded intelligence layer across the entire digital payments lifecycle. From our vantage point, we see three primary ways AI is driving meaningful modernization in B2B payments:

1. Improving Operational Efficiency
   AI is helping organizations automate repetitive, manual tasks—everything from payment reconciliation and cash application to anomaly detection in billing. This reduces friction in internal processes and shortens time to revenue. It’s not about replacing people; it’s about equipping teams to move faster and focus on higher-value work.
2. Enhancing Decision-making with Predictive Insights
   Fintech leaders are leveraging AI to forecast payment behavior, identify at-risk accounts and optimize payment terms. These insights allow for more proactive financial planning and customer engagement, which is especially valuable in volatile economic environments.
3. Accelerating Innovation at the Platform Level
   Rather than bolting AI onto existing systems, forward-thinking firms are building it into the core of their platforms—enabling real-time guidance, smart configuration and self-service capabilities. This foundational approach not only supports scalability, but also empowers finance teams to adapt quickly as business models and customer expectations evolve.

In short, AI is becoming the connective tissue between data, decisions and execution. For fintech innovators, it’s less about isolated use cases and more about rethinking how intelligence can power every step of the billing and payments process.

What are some of the core challenges that still remain for finance and ops teams as they navigate different kinds of payment hurdles?

Even as payment technologies advance, finance and operations teams continue to face several persistent challenges:

1. Fragmented Payment Ecosystems
   Many organizations still rely on multiple disconnected systems to manage billing, payments and reconciliation. This leads to inefficiencies, increased risk of errors and a lack of real-time visibility into cash flow.
2. Reconciliation Complexities
   Reconciling incoming payments with customer accounts is often a manual, time-consuming task—especially when dealing with partial payments, chargebacks or complex invoice structures. Without automation, it becomes a bottleneck for finance teams.
3. Compliance and Security Pressure
   Staying compliant with evolving regulatory standards like PCI DSS, PSD2 and local tax laws can be daunting. The burden of maintaining secure infrastructure and audit trails continues to grow, especially for global businesses handling cross-border transactions.
4. Limited Flexibility for Customers
   Customers expect modern, intuitive and flexible payment experiences—but legacy systems often can’t support self-service portals, mobile-friendly options or diverse payment methods, which can lead to delayed or missed payments.
5. Lack of Data-driven Insights
   Many teams lack access to timely, actionable payment data that could inform forecasting, reduce DSO (days sales outstanding) or highlight friction in the customer journey. Without this visibility, it’s hard to proactively improve.

In short, while the technology is evolving, many of the day-to-day hurdles stem from outdated processes, siloed systems and a reactive rather than strategic approach to payments. Addressing these gaps is key to enabling growth and agility.

Five Thoughts on the Future of Fintech and Paytech to share about in this chat?

1. Embedded finance will become the default.
   Payments will continue to disappear into the background of digital experiences. The future is less about standalone tools and more about embedding financial functionality directly into business platforms, workflows and ecosystems.
2. AI will shift from back-office automation to front-office intelligence.
   We’ll see AI not just reconciling payments or flagging fraud—but actively informing pricing strategies, surfacing revenue opportunities and personalizing the customer experience in real time.
3. The convergence of billing and payments will accelerate.
   As companies look to improve cash flow and reduce friction, the gap between invoicing, payments and collections will continue to narrow—driving demand for unified, agile platforms.
4. Global compliance will be a competitive differentiator.
   With rising regulatory complexity, especially around cross-border payments, companies that can automate compliance and adapt quickly to regional changes will have a clear edge.
5. Finance and ops will lead digital transformation—not just support it.
   In the coming years, finance teams will take a more strategic role—using modern fintech tools to not only reduce costs but also to enable new revenue models and reshape customer relationships.

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