The B2B Payment Yield Model: Revealing the Financial Performance Inside Every Enterprise Payment
The Payment Economics Journal | Issue #5
Published: Monday, December 15, 2025
The Invisible Economics of Enterprise Payments
Most financial disciplines emerged when someone recognized that critical decisions were being made repeatedly without a framework for understanding their economic impact.
Portfolio theory emerged when investors needed a systematic way to evaluate risk and return across assets.
Working capital management emerged when CFOs recognized that balance-sheet optimization required more than cash accounting.
Payment Economics is emerging now for the same reason.
Enterprises execute thousands of payment decisions each month, yet for decades those decisions were optimized almost entirely for efficiency, cost, and throughput, not for financial performance.
As CFO priorities shift toward liquidity, resilience, and value creation, the role of payments in enterprise financial performance can no longer remain invisible.
When automation removed the processing noise, something important became clear:
Payments are not operational events. They are economic decisions.
Each payment influences:
Liquidity and capital efficiency
Supplier stability and supply-chain health
Working-capital dynamics
Strategic leverage and negotiation power
Accounts Payable teams have always influenced these outcomes.
What they lacked was a way to measure the financial consequences of those decisions, and the permission to optimize for them.
This issue introduces the KPI that changes that.
What Measurement Reveals
The financial value created by payment decisions has always existed.
Forward-thinking treasurers and finance leaders have long understood that payments function as a working-capital tool.
What changed is not the existence of value. It is the ability to measure it consistently, at scale, and in economic terms.
Once payment behavior is measured economically, the source of human value becomes clear.
Human judgment now operates where automation cannot:
Balancing liquidity with supplier needs
Understanding timing and capital implications
Interpreting supplier acceptance patterns
Selecting the economically superior payment rail
Modeling downstream supply-chain effects
Connecting payment behavior to enterprise financial strategy
Payment Yield gives teams a way to measure this decision layer: not activity, not volume, but financial performance.
The Payment Yield Model
In this issue, we formally define Payment Yield as a financial KPI that measures the economic performance generated by enterprise payment decisions.
Payment Yield (KPI)
Payment Yield measures the financial performance generated by enterprise payment decisions as a percentage of total payment volume.
Formula
Payment Yield = Capital Return (CR) × Supplier Acceptance (SA)
This model quantifies the financial contribution of payments with clarity, precision, and economic integrity.
Capital Return (CR)
Capital Return represents the measurable financial lift created by the payment method itself:
Timing benefits and float
Working-capital improvement
Liquidity optimization
Incentive and reward capture
Cost-of-capital advantages
Enhanced cash-conversion dynamics
CR reframes payment choice as a capital allocation decision rather than a processing preference.
Supplier Acceptance (SA)
Supplier Acceptance represents the real-world constraint: the percentage of suppliers able and willing to receive the chosen payment method.
High CR without acceptance remains theoretical.
High acceptance without return limits performance.
Payment Yield exists only when both variables move together.
As explored in Issue 4, supplier acceptance was historically constrained to approximately 10–15 percent due to misaligned supplier economics and fragmented infrastructure. Modern payment platforms have expanded acceptance into the 50–70 percent range.
Once both variables become movable, financial performance becomes measurable, and optimizable.
The Math That Changes Everything
Company A
1.5% CR × 10% SA = 0.15% Payment Yield
Company B
1.5% CR × 60% SA = 0.90% Payment Yield
Same payment volume.
Same rebate rate.
Six times more financial performance from the same spend.
On enterprise-scale payment volumes, this gap compounds into millions of dollars in unrealized value each year.
Organizations achieving higher Payment Yield think economically. They optimize both sides of the equation. They treat AP as a financial engine — not an administrative function.
How Payment Yield Creates Enterprise Value
A. Balance-Sheet Value
Payment Yield directly improves:
Working capital
Cash-flow forecasting accuracy
Dependence on external borrowing
Cost of capital
Liquidity resilience
These outcomes align directly with CFO priorities. Research consistently shows that Accounts Payable plays a strategic role in working-capital optimization when payment execution is treated as a financial discipline rather than an operational task.
B. P&L Value
Payment Yield connects payment behavior directly to:
Incentive and rebate income
Interchange and rail optimization
Operational cost reduction
Supplier-term negotiation leverage
Fewer late-payment penalties
Reduced supply-chain disruption costs
This shifts AP from cost center to economic contributor.
C. Supply-Chain Value
Payment Yield strengthens the broader enterprise ecosystem:
Healthier suppliers
Reduced systemic risk
More predictable fulfillment
Stronger long-term partnerships
This remains one of the most under-measured sources of enterprise value. Leading organizations recognize that payment method, timing, and predictability materially influence supplier behavior and supply-chain resilience.
Why CFOs Are Paying Attention
Payment Yield aligns directly with CFO decision frameworks:
Simple, defensible model
Clear economic variables
Measurable outcomes
Direct linkage to liquidity and capital strategy
Compatibility with FP&A and Treasury systems
It creates a shared economic language across AP, Finance, and Treasury.
When AP delivers measurable Payment Yield, the function becomes inseparable from financial strategy.
Industry research increasingly confirms that the era of back-office AP is ending as finance leaders elevate payment execution into a strategic lever for working-capital performance.
Infrastructure Requirements
Every financial discipline requires infrastructure.
Optimizing Payment Yield at scale requires:
Real-time supplier acceptance data
Predictive timing and liquidity models
Multi-rail economic analysis
Dynamic Capital Return calculation
Integrated supplier communication
Automated, economically grounded recommendations
This marks the transition from AP automation to payment intelligence.
Industry analysis shows companies achieving measurable working-capital improvements through comprehensive transformation of payment operations.
Organizations achieving the highest Payment Yield operate on platforms capable of capturing payment-level economics and translating them into repeatable financial strategy.
Conclusion
Payment Yield provides the KPI that gives structure, clarity, and strategic purpose to enterprise payments.
It moves AP beyond processing.
It elevates the function into financial stewardship.
It aligns payment execution with CFO priorities around liquidity, performance, and resilience.
Automation increases capacity.
People create economic capability.
Payment Yield turns that capability into measurable financial performance.
Next Week: Issue 6
The Payment Portfolio Manager
The role shaped by the Payment Yield Model.
The future identity of Accounts Payable.
What it means to be human in finance when automation can handle almost everything else.
Platforms Applying Payment Economics
AP Copilot: Virtual card platform maximizing supplier acceptance and cashback.
Learn more: apcopilot.com
About The Payment Economics Journal
The Payment Economics Journal is published by Clear Paths Growth to formalize the discipline of treating payments as economic assets rather than administrative overhead.
The frameworks and metrics presented in this journal emerged from observing leading practitioners who were generating measurable financial performance from payment operations before the discipline existed to explain it.
Media inquiries: advisory@clearpathsgrowth.com
Suggested Citation
Jasinski, D. (2025). Payment Yield: A KPI for Measuring the Financial Performance of Enterprise Payments. The Payment Economics Journal, Issue 5. Clear Paths Growth.
Authorship & Intellectual Property
Payment Yield and the Payment Yield Model were originally defined by Daniel Jasinski and published by Clear Paths Growth in The Payment Economics Journal (December 2025).
All models, frameworks, and definitions presented herein are the intellectual property of Clear Paths Growth LLC. Brief quotations are permitted with proper attribution. Commercial reuse or derivative implementation requires written permission.
© 2025 Clear Paths Growth LLC. All rights reserved.
References
Bank of America. (n.d.). Payments as a Working Capital Tool. Retrieved from https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/payments-as-working-capital-tool.html
CBIZ. (2025, December 2). Accelerating Growth Through Working Capital Optimization. Retrieved from https://www.cbiz.com/insights/case-study/accelerating-growth-through-working-capital-optimization
HighRadius. (2025, December). Accounts Payables Software: The 2025 CFO's Guide. Retrieved from https://www.highradius.com/resources/Blog/accounts-payables-software-guide/
J.P. Morgan. (n.d.). Supplier Relationship Management: Strategies and Best Practices. Retrieved from https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/business-planning/supplier-relationship-management-strategies-and-best-practices
J.P. Morgan. (n.d.). Working Capital Optimization in Accounts Payables. Retrieved from https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/payments/trade-and-working-capital/working-capital-optimization-in-accounts-payables
PYMNTS. (2025, November 21). Mastercard Pushes CFOs to Seize Control of Working Capital. Retrieved from https://www.pymnts.com/mastercard/2025/mastercard-pushes-cfos-to-seize-control-of-working-capital