Businesses Looking to Revamp Payment Strategies Will Embrace Digital Payments, an AFP Study Says

As the popularity of digital payments increases, more businesses and organizations are looking to revamp their strategies to keep up with the trend, according to the Association for Financial Professionals’ 2025 Digital Payments Survey.

Among the businesses and organizations surveyed for the triennial study, 76% expect to update their payments strategy in the next few years. The leading reason is to find ways to tap new payment options. Some 72% of respondents say they will explore new payment formats or channels with expanded technology capabilities, while 40% say they will revise their payment strategies to update or mitigate their payment file formats, and 38% say they will develop a comprehensive strategy for baseline payment type usage or need. Respondents could cite more than one choice.

The AFP received 223 responses from corporate executives in the U.S. and Canada. Job titles included: vice president and treasurer, treasurer, assistant treasurer, director treasury, manager treasury, cash manager, and treasury analyst. The AFP’s survey, conducted in May, was underwritten by J.P. Morgan.

Faster payments are becoming more important to businesses, the report says. More than 30% of respondents say faster payments are having a positive impact on their business. Of those respondents, 11% say their experience with faster payments has been very positive, while 20% rate their experience with faster payments as positive. In addition, 28% say they are using faster payments for business-to-business payments.

Still, checks remain a popular payment option for B2B payments, the report says. Despite an executive order from the Trump Administration earlier this year mandating a transition to electronic payments for all Federal disbursements and receipts, just 5% of respondents say the mandate has prompted them to convert the majority of their B2B payments from check to digital. In addition, 19% of respondents say their decision to shift B2B payments away from checks to digital was “partly influenced” by the executive order.

But check usage for B2B payments continues to decline. Just 26% of respondents say they are making these payments by check, a 7-percentage-point decline from the previous AFP Digital Payments Survey in 2022.

Less than 30% of respondents say they are “familiar” with cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology or the role of central bank digital currencies. The most significant opportunity for digital payments is for domestic payments, the survey says.

Another trend that is becoming more popular is cross-border payments, with 87% of respondents initiating them, a 9-percentage point increase from 2022. The AFP expects cross-border transaction volume will continue to grow as more companies adopt ISO 20022, an international financial-messaging standard that replaces older, less detailed message formats.