Issue 12 laid out the supplier conversation: the approach, the preparation, the economic framing that earns acceptance. That work generates momentum. Suppliers agree to virtual card acceptance. Payment Yield improves. The numbers move in visible, measurable ways. What happens next determines whether those gains become permanent infrastructure or a brief experiment that fades when attention shifts elsewhere.
The answer lives inside the organization. The supplier conversation earns external results. The internal business case earns the organizational investment that sustains them.
The Conversation Changes Direction
Practitioners who complete their first round of supplier outreach face a specific inflection point. They have results. They have data. They have proof that Payment Economics produces financial return. And they have a new audience: the people who control resources, priorities, and reporting structures need to see that proof translated into language they already use to make decisions.
This is a different skill than supplier engagement. Supplier conversations are economic negotiations between organizations. Internal business cases are alignment exercises within a single organization. The practitioner already knows the framework works. The task is making that knowledge transferable to stakeholders who measure success on different terms.
Gartner’s 2026 CFO Agenda survey of 200 CFOs found that 56% rank enterprise-wide cost optimization in their top five priorities, while 51% cite improving financial forecast accuracy (Gartner, 2026). These are the terms. Payment Economics practitioners who speak in “card rebates” or “supplier conversions” speak a language that stops at the AP department wall. Practitioners who speak in “return on payment volume” and “cost-per-basis-point-of-yield” speak a language that travels through it.
Three Audiences, Three Frames
The internal business case serves three audiences simultaneously, and each audience evaluates the same results through a different lens.
Executive sponsors care about return on invested resources and strategic alignment with enterprise priorities. Deloitte’s Q4 2025 CFO Signals Survey found that 54% of CFOs at companies with $1 billion or more in revenue plan to integrate AI agents, 50% plan to automate and accelerate financial processes, and 48% plan to invest in technology infrastructure (Deloitte, 2025). A Payment Economics business case that connects to these existing priorities earns consideration. One that presents itself as a standalone AP initiative competes for attention against dozens of other requests.
The frame for executive sponsors is enterprise contribution. Payment Yield improves the organization’s net financial position on every dollar of payable spend. For a company processing $100 million in annual payables, a Payment Yield improvement from 15 basis points to 45 basis points represents $300,000 in incremental annual value. That number belongs in the same conversation as working capital optimization, cash flow forecasting accuracy, and balance sheet efficiency.
Peer functions care about how Payment Economics intersects with their own mandates. Treasury wants to understand float impact and cash flow timing implications. Procurement wants to know whether supplier acceptance efforts create friction in strategic sourcing relationships. FP&A wants reliable data they can build into forecasting models. Each peer function asks the same underlying question: does this discipline create value for me, or does it create work for me?
The practitioner’s job is to answer that question with specifics. Treasury gains 30 to 60 days of additional float on every virtual card transaction, which directly supports their cash positioning objectives. Procurement gains a healthier supplier relationship portfolio: Mastercard’s 2025 Harris Poll survey found that suppliers accepting card payments report being 14 percentage points more likely to rate themselves efficient at maximizing working capital (Mastercard, 2025). A supplier who manages working capital efficiently is a more stable supply chain partner. FP&A gains a new, predictable line item with quarterly trend data that strengthens forecast accuracy.
The AP team itself responds to a third frame: professional identity and career trajectory. Payment Economics transforms the AP function from a cost center into a revenue-contributing operation. Ardent Partners’ 2025 research documents that 75% of AP departments now use some form of AI, and best-in-class organizations process invoices at $2.78 each compared to the $12.88 average among laggards (Bartolini, 2025). The discipline gives AP professionals measurable outcomes that translate directly to career advancement and compensation growth. Practitioners building the internal business case benefit from understanding that their team’s engagement depends on seeing personal upside alongside organizational return.
Translating Payment Yield Into Executive Language
Payment Yield is the discipline’s core metric. It measures the net financial return per dollar of payment volume, expressed in basis points. The metric works perfectly for practitioners who operate inside the framework daily. It requires translation for executives who evaluate dozens of metrics across the enterprise.
The translation follows a straightforward structure. Start with what the organization spends on payables annually. Apply the current Payment Yield. Show the dollar value that yield represents. Then show what the yield becomes with continued investment in supplier acceptance and method optimization, and what that improved yield produces in dollar terms.
A concrete example: an organization with $200 million in annual payable spend currently captures 20 basis points of Payment Yield, producing $400,000 in annual financial value across rebates, float benefit, and processing cost avoidance. Supplier acceptance work over the prior quarter expanded virtual card coverage from 18% to 26% of spend. Maintaining that trajectory through the next three quarters projects Payment Yield reaching 55 basis points, producing $1.1 million in annual value. The incremental $700,000 requires investment in one dedicated practitioner’s time, platform costs of approximately $50,000 annually, and quarterly executive review time of roughly two hours per cycle.
That is a business case a CFO can evaluate in the same framework they use for any other investment: cost of resources in, measurable financial return out, clear timeline for results. McKinsey’s CFO Pulse surveys consistently emphasize that CFOs evaluate investments through “clear, measurable business cases with defined KPIs” and are “being really careful about what they must spend versus what is a nice-to-have” (McKinsey, 2025). Payment Yield provides exactly that measurability.
PwC’s Finance Transformation research adds an important contextual point: finance functions are approaching “terminal value” in traditional cost reduction, meaning that diminishing returns from efficiency alone are pushing leading organizations toward generating business insights and driving enterprise strategy (PwC, 2025). Payment Economics fits this shift precisely. The business case is stronger when framed as strategic finance innovation rather than incremental process improvement.
What a Payment Economics Quarterly Review Looks Like
The quarterly review is the rhythm that keeps the internal business case alive. A single presentation earns initial investment. Sustained quarterly reporting earns continued and expanded investment.
A Payment Economics quarterly review covers four dimensions. First, Payment Yield trend: the current quarter’s yield compared to the prior quarter and the trailing four-quarter average. The trend line demonstrates trajectory, which is what executives use to evaluate sustained performance. Second, Supplier Acceptance movement: the number of suppliers converted, the percentage of spend now covered by optimized payment methods, and the pipeline of suppliers in active conversation. Third, Capital Return performance: the total financial value captured during the quarter, separated into rebate income, float benefit, and processing cost reduction. Fourth, cost-to-operate: the total resources invested in the Payment Economics function during the quarter, stated as both a dollar figure and a ratio against Capital Return.
That fourth dimension is what earns credibility. Practitioners who report only the value they create invite skepticism about the cost of creating it. Practitioners who report both create an efficiency ratio that CFOs immediately understand. If the function generates $275,000 in quarterly Capital Return and costs $45,000 to operate, the ratio speaks for itself. The Forrester Total Economic Impact methodology has become the standard framework for building these cases: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks evaluated together produce a complete picture that finance leaders trust (Forrester, 2024).
The quarterly review also produces the next quarter’s targets. Each review cycle closes with specific goals: target Supplier Acceptance percentage, target Capital Return range, and any portfolio rebalancing priorities. These forward-looking commitments transform the function from one that reports on past results into one that projects and delivers against future commitments. Issue 22 develops the full quarterly communication framework in operational detail.
Framing the Ask: Resources, Authority, and Structure
The internal business case eventually requires a specific ask. Resources mean dedicated practitioner time, platform investment, and executive review bandwidth. Authority means the organizational permission to lead supplier conversations, influence payment method selection, and report Payment Yield as a standing KPI. Reporting structure means a clear line to the stakeholder who can sustain investment through budget cycles and organizational changes.
The ask scales with results. A practitioner in the first quarter might request formal recognition that the organization tracks Payment Yield and 20% of one person’s time dedicated to supplier outreach. By the fourth quarter, with demonstrated results, the ask can expand to a dedicated role, platform budget, and a quarterly reporting slot with the CFO or VP of Finance.
The sequencing mirrors how organizations actually allocate resources. Deloitte’s survey data shows that cost management (53%) and efficiency and productivity (52%) remain the dominant internal concerns among large-company CFOs (Deloitte, 2025). A large initial ask triggers cost management reflexes. A small initial ask that delivers measurable returns triggers the productivity reflex: this works, let us do more of it.
The proof-point cascade operates on this principle. Each quarter’s results expand the next quarter’s mandate. Quarter one produces Payment Yield data and initial supplier conversions. Quarter two produces a trend line and a Capital Return figure. Quarter three produces a ratio of value created to resources invested. Quarter four produces a twelve-month track record that justifies formal organizational investment. The practitioner who follows this cascade arrives at the annual budget conversation with four quarters of evidence rather than a projection.
Why ‘Act First, Measure Always’ Outperforms ‘Measure First, Ask Later’
A common instinct is to spend months building a comprehensive business case before taking any action. Gather all the data. Model every scenario. Present a polished proposal. Then wait for approval before beginning supplier outreach or Payment Yield tracking.
This approach stalls for a specific reason: it asks decision-makers to approve investment based on projections alone. Projections are useful. Results are persuasive. The practitioner who begins tracking Payment Yield in week one, conducts three supplier conversations by month two, and presents actual results in month three has something a projection-only approach cannot match: proof that the framework produces returns in this specific organization with this specific supplier base.
The PYMNTS Intelligence data reinforces this pattern from the market side. Nine in ten firms are adopting or pursuing virtual cards, while only 27% have fully automated supplier payments (PYMNTS, 2025). The gap between interest and execution is precisely the gap that “measure first, ask later” creates. Organizations that move from interest to action quickly, even at small scale, close that gap. Organizations that study the gap tend to keep studying it.
“Act first, measure always” is the operational expression of the Law of Bounded Action. You already have the authority to calculate your organization’s current Payment Yield. Three supplier conversations require initiative, not budget. Results are what earn continued investment. The fastest path to results is action within the scope you already control, paired with measurement from the first day. The data that action produces becomes the business case.
The AFP 2025 Digital Payments Survey provides context for why action creates its own momentum: only 22% of companies report that most of their eligible B2B payments are digital, a figure essentially unchanged from 2019 despite years of industry attention (AFP, 2025). Six years of measurement-without-action left that figure unchanged. The organizations that moved are the ones that started with bounded objectives and expanded from observed results.
The First Year’s Complete Toolkit
Issue 13 completes the practitioner’s toolkit for the first year of Payment Economics implementation. The arc from Issue 7 through Issue 13 covers the full cycle: identifying the economic opportunity inside existing AP workflows (Issue 7), building the function with organizational authority (Issue 9), calculating Payment Yield with a concrete methodology (Issue 10), installing the measurement stack that tracks performance across three layers (Issue 11), conducting supplier conversations that expand acceptance (Issue 12), and now converting those results into sustained organizational investment.
A practitioner who has followed this sequence has everything required to operate a Payment Economics function through its first four quarters. They can calculate their number. They can measure their progress. They can have the conversations that expand their portfolio. And they can build the internal case that earns the resources to keep going.
The Hackett Group’s 2025 data provides a useful benchmark for what “keep going” produces at scale: $1.7 trillion in excess working capital sits trapped across the top 1,000 U.S. public companies, representing 35% of gross working capital and 11% of aggregate revenue (Hackett Group, 2025). The internal business case unlocks the practitioner’s share of that figure. The quarterly review compounds it.
Questions Worth Asking
Can you state your organization’s current Payment Yield in basis points, and can you state the dollar value that figure represents annually?
When you present Payment Economics results, do you frame them in the language your CFO already uses to evaluate investments, or do you frame them in AP-specific terminology?
Do you know which peer functions benefit from your Payment Economics work, and have you quantified that benefit in terms they recognize?
If your organization’s budget cycle began next month, could you present four quarters of Payment Yield data to support continued investment?
Have you calculated the ratio of value your function creates to the resources it consumes, and would that ratio survive scrutiny from a finance leader evaluating competing investment requests?
Building Forward
Issue 14 examines Payment Method Economics: the true cost and return of every B2B payment rail. Most organizations evaluate payment methods by processing cost. Payment Economics evaluates them by net economic contribution. The issue maps the full economic profile of virtual cards, ACH, wire, check, dynamic discounting, and early payment programs, giving practitioners the reference framework for every method conversation they will have.
Payment Economics in Practice
AP Copilot: The AP platform built for AP teams. AP Copilot turns accounts payable into a profit center with workflow tools designed for the people who actually process payments. The platform achieves 50% virtual card acceptance, 10x the industry average, by making supplier conversion and daily payment work visible, collaborative, and rewarding. 1% of all revenue goes to planting trees. Learn more: https://apcopilot.com
About The Payment Economics Journal
The Payment Economics Journal examines how organizations measure and capture economic return from payment operations. Published weekly. Created by Daniel Jasinski.
Payment Economics Framework
For the complete Payment Economics framework, including Payment Yield, Capital Return, Supplier Acceptance, and the Payment Portfolio Manager role, see the official website of the Payment Economics Journal.
Suggested Citation
Jasinski, D. (2026). The Business Case for Payment Economics: What Decision-Makers Need to See. The Payment Economics Journal, Issue 13. Clear Paths Growth.
Authorship & Intellectual Property
© 2026 Daniel Jasinski. All rights reserved. The Payment Economics Journal, Payment Yield, Capital Return, Supplier Acceptance, Payment Portfolio Manager, Payment Economics Practitioner, Payment Efficiency Index (PEI), and Payment Cost Ratio (PCR) are original frameworks and terms introduced by Daniel Jasinski. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews and academic citations with proper attribution.
References
AFP. (2025). 2025 AFP Digital Payments Survey Report. Association for Financial Professionals. https://www.financialprofessionals.org/training-resources/resources/survey-research-economic-data/Details/digitalpayments
Bartolini, A. (2025). AP Metrics That Matter 2025. Ardent Partners. https://ardentpartners.com/ap-metrics-that-matter-in-2025
Deloitte. (2025). CFO Signals: Q4 2025. Deloitte CFO Program. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/business-strategy-growth/4q-2025-cfo-signals-survey.html
Forrester. (2024). The Total Economic Impact of Commercial Credit Card Acceptance: An Update. Forrester Consulting / Visa. https://corporate.visa.com/en/solutions/commercial-solutions/knowledge-hub/forrester-total-economic-impact-of-commercial-credit-card-acceptance.html
Gartner. (2026). Top CFO Priorities and Challenges for 2026. Gartner, Inc. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-08-12-gartner-survey-shows-top-priorities-for-cfos-in-2026-include-cost-optimization
Hackett Group. (2025). 2025 U.S. Working Capital Survey. The Hackett Group. https://www.thehackettgroup.com/insights/2025-working-capital-survey-2508/
Mastercard. (2025). The State of Commercial Card Acceptance 2025. Mastercard / Harris Poll. https://www.mastercard.com/us/en/news-and-trends/Insights/2025/the-state-of-commercial-card-acceptance-2025.html
McKinsey & Company. (2025). The 2025 McKinsey Global Payments Report: Competing Systems, Contested Outcomes. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/global-payments-report
PwC. (2025). Have Top Performing Finance Functions Reached Terminal Value in the Age of AI? PricewaterhouseCoopers. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/business-transformation/library/have-finance-functions-reached-terminal-value-in-the-age-of-ai.html
PYMNTS. (2025). Why 2025 Could Be the Year of the Virtual Card. PYMNTS Intelligence / American Express. https://www.pymnts.com/tracker_posts/why-2025-could-be-the-year-of-the-virtual-card