For the last year or so, Ariba’s been talking about the new payment addition to their suite of solutions – AribaPay. It's been an important move for the company in their quest to capture the whole end to end of business transactions, and one which Senior Director Solutions Marketing, Drew Hofler talked to APN about at their AribaLIVE event last week. While it’s currently only available in the US, the development team are looking towards creating a UK version, possibly as soon as this year. To deliver the solution in the US, Ariba partners with Discover – a direct banking and payments services company, the question of when Ariba launches in the UK and/or globally, is likely to sit around finding a comparable partner to work with.

One of the key drivers for the product in the US seems to be as a way to drive paper, and inparticular cheques, with all their associated problems, out of the system. Of course in the UK, the quantity of cheques used in any capacity is negligible. So, if Ariba are aiming for a UK, or more global product, the marketing message will need to shift accordingly. But, in terms of improved transaction speed, increased visibility as well as fraud and error reduction, AribaPay will be a useful addition to the solution, and one which positions them as one of the very few who are able to offer a real end to end solution, powered by a strong network.

The solution is available to all Ariba Network buyers and their suppliers, regardless of ERP or current payment method, and Hofler was at pains to stress that AribaPay is not a commercial card product and no card agreement is needed to accept AribaPay payments. Discover’s role is to deliver a secure and trusted payments infrastructure to facilitate the transactions.

Also, importantly, Hofler pointed out that there are no fees associated with payment, the solution is an on-time settlement where once the funds are withdrawn from the buyer’s account, they’re sent to the supplier straight away.

And one of the big pluses is that AribaPay allows buyers to pay invoices electronically without having to store suppliers’ critical bank account information. Discover takes the bank account information of the supplier and validates it. Once this has been done, Discover's system produces what’s called an Ariba Merchant ID number - a number that simply matches up with the information held on the Ariba network to the Discover details. As it’s in effect a “nonsense” number, it means that if it’s stolen, any potential fraudster is going to find themselves thwarted.

Ariba have already had some success with the product with early adopters,T-Mobile bringing their 20,000 suppliers into the system. And although T-Mobile admits that supplier onboarding was not an easy task, the end result has been a success, one which Ariba rewarded by presenting T-Mobile with their Network Innovation Award at AribaLIVE.

Ariba have spent a lot of time and energy on building out their commerce network, and adding an ePayment solution with the capacity for better remittance information to their suppliers has the potential to bring significant benefit to organisations looking to streamline and add reportable visibility to their processes.

Add to that the innovation announcements to its cloud-based applications and mobile-first user interface (UI) announced at the conference, and it looks a lot like Ariba’s aims to make B2B commerce reflect the B2C world are starting to be realised.