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A worker demonstrates Apple Pay inside a mobile kiosk sponsored by Visa and Wells Fargo.
- Businesses around the world pay each other about $127 trillion every year, and the process is still bogged down by paperwork and administrative costs.
- According to a report from Goldman Sachs, there's $1 trillion in revenue to be earned by companies such as credit-card networks that digitize and cheapen the business-to-business payments process.
- The analysts listed 11 publicly traded companies at the forefront of this opportunity.
A $1 trillion opportunity is open for companies that get in front of changing how businesses make payments, according to Goldman Sachs analysts.
That's how much revenue Goldman Sachs analysts estimate banks and payments processors can earn from improving how businesses worldwide settle their accounts payable.
"With the vast majority of invoices still processed manually and paid by paper check, we see significant opportunities for business to reduce costs - creating new revenue pools for payment and software companies entering the market with faster, lower-cost invoice processing and payment solutions," the analysts led by James Schneider said in a report released Sunday.
Business-to-business payments add up to $127 trillion in flows, and could nearly double to an estimated $200 trillion by 2028, the analysts said.
Small businesses should see the most cost savings as they adopt more digital solutions like automatic invoice processing (versus manually capturing all the data). North American businesses spend an estimated $510 billion every year on payments to suppliers, including costs like labor, foreign transaction fees, and interest on short-term loans, the analysts said.
"While thus far the digitization of B2B payment flows has been slow - especially among small business - we believe the market is finally poised to accelerate," Schneider said.
The list below features the publicly traded companies, including card networks and software providers, that Goldman believes will be most exposed to these revenues over the next five years.
