Transforming Hospitality Through Embedded Payment Innovation

When Phil Beck joined BirchStreet in the summer of 2024, he brought years of experience in banking and solving complex payment problems that are proving crucial to the innovative cloud-based payment provider. 

The company is a global market leader in procure-to-pay software-as-a-service for the hospitality industry. Founded over two decades ago, its success is built on enabling hotels, restaurants and food service providers to automate their procurement processes, streamline payments and improve efficiency. 

Phil understands the inherent challenges of this process well. His journey in finance dates back to the mid-1990s, where he worked as a banker at PNC. Being embedded in the industry over subsequent years has seen him work for several companies including FreeMarkets, Ariba and SAP solving sourcing and procure-to-pay challenges. 

“I kept gravitating toward embedded payments as an area that had innate interest for me as a finance person,” he explains. This fascination eventually saw him pivot to Capital One's commercial bank, where he led the treasury function and gained invaluable knowledge as to how large financial institutions solve payment problems at scale and partner with technology companies to embed their solutions. 

Joining Birchstreet gave Phil the opportunity to bring these best practices to an industry in need of modernisation. 

The hospitality sector presents unique challenges. Unlike other industries that have shifted towards digital-first payments, hospitality still relies heavily on manual processes. Cheque payments remain common, creating inefficiencies and increasing fraud risk, as well as leading to friction in supply chain processes. 

Within this context, Phil’s objective is to embed payment capabilities directly into Birchstreet’s procurement platform. “This has been a chance to bring best practices from all sizes and scales into a vertical that has a definite need to modernise and digitise payments,” he says. 

The goal is that, rather than payments being treated as a separate function and the purview of finance departments, data and controls sit where they are most needed: with frontline operators dealing with suppliers every day. 

“We've brought it front and centre to the frontline operator, which changes the dynamic and the experience for that customer,” Phil highlights.

Digitalisation and efficiency in hospitality

Birchstreet serves all the major global hospitality brands alongside property management companies, casinos, food services providers and group purchasing organisations. Its platform, developed through deep collaboration with customers and strategic partners, helps users, suppliers and organisations to optimise processes, transform operations and improve margins. 

The company’s platform enhances business processes by automating eProcurement, AP automation, inventory control, recipe management and analytics.

In order to effectively drive this transformation, Phil has spent much of his first year engaging closely with customers. “They have been great and very welcoming,” he says, “helping to educate me rapidly on the differences that are inherent in the industry.”

Learning hospitality from the inside has revealed operational complexities Phil never experienced as a business traveller. 

For example, one of the biggest challenges has been adapting broad, horizontal payment capabilities for hospitality's specific needs. Birchstreet’s unique value proposition lies in its ability to fine-tune platforms and solutions typically created to serve multiple industries into hospitality-specific solutions. 

The company focuses on three core areas: helping customers digitise payments and move away from cheques; embedding payments within the application layer that both centralised finance teams and decentralised operators use daily; and reducing fraud risk through digitisation.

The latter, says Phil, remains a key challenge with the industry facing growing fraud rates in areas including cheque washing and cheque fraud. Digital technologies provide an effective way of controlling and managing this risk

Creating a global partner ecosystem

Birchstreet relies on close collaboration with strategic technology partners, including payments processors. For example, the company has chosen to embed payments whilst outsourcing the actual payment execution – whether card, cheque or automated clearing house transfers – to specialist partners.

Phil and his team follow a multi-partner approach, working to expand the company’s core partner ecosystem by bringing leading businesses with unique capabilities into the fold – a methodology he says is crucial for delivering best-in-class customer experiences. 

“One of our fastest growing segments is hospitality management companies outside the US, which creates both opportunities and challenges since payments are very regional,” Phil says. 

Different partners help BirchStreet expand geographically while solving specific pain points – some processors excel at machine learning models that identify optimal payment rails and improve supplier enrolment, for example.

Others offer superior capabilities for enterprise customers or the ability to execute payments in specific geographic markets. By maintaining multiple partnerships, BirchStreet can select the best tool for each situation.

“As an industry, hospitality has been expanding rapidly with brands that were previously in one local market now operating on a multi-national or even global scale,” Phil says. 

As hospitality becomes more and more global, it creates complexity for payment execution. Managing payments across these markets requires regional expertise that no single bank or payment processor can deliver alone. Hence the partner ecosystem approach.

Enhancing supplier enrollment with ViewPost

One key partner is ViewPost, a market leader in B2B payments automation that has pioneered next generation, real-time supplier enrollment and conversion from check to virtual card and automated clearing house (ACH). 

“Adding ViewPost to our ecosystem of payment providers expands funding options, enhances supplier onboarding and delivers an embedded experience to all of our customers,” says Phil. “ViewPost offers both pre-fund and check-fund options that allow customers to ‘bring your own bank’ or use our bank partners to initiate disbursements. In addition, they have developed best-in-class real-time supplier enablement capabilities that use AI to prioritise suppliers for onboarding and to facilitate portal/IVR payments.  This simplifies and enhances the supplier enrollment process, driving more card acceptance and higher customer satisfaction.”

ViewPost’s capabilities are embedded within the Birchstreet Pay solution using real-time APIs that send and receive data between platforms and bank partners. This enables direct access for customers without the need for further payment processor integration and brings greater automation and data visibility to customers. 

“Automation of payment execution and visibility of the payment status from initiation through full settlement within the BirchStreet Pay application layer are key benefits derived from utilising our platform,” says Phil.  

“This enables continual optimisation of payments across virtual card, check and ACH rails,” he continues. “It also provides real-time visibility within our UI for all payment events when they occur, enabling front-line operators to self-service supplier payment inquiries, lowering the operational burden on centralised finance teams.”

The company also focuses on helping enterprise customers solve their "last mile" problem – many of these large brands have already achieved 60-80% digitisation, but struggle with the remaining manual payments. 

ViewPost brings specific capabilities for this segment, including advanced technology for converting those final holdouts.

Beck is particularly excited about ViewPost's machine learning capabilities. The company has developed models that analyse and score supplier transactions in real time, using those insights to transform the onboarding experience. 

That data-driven approach represents cutting-edge capability in the payments space.

Delivering tangible success

Collaboration with ViewPost has improved the experience for Birchstreet’s hospitality and procurement clients, helping tackle perennial pain points in the B2B payments process. 

Phil reports benefits including higher customer ROI from payments with lower effort and on accelerated timelines, as well as improved customer experience. The collaboration also brings greater flexibility and real-time, AI-prioritised supplier enablement.

“Early feedback has been very positive, with customers citing faster time-to-value and improved supplier enrollment as key advantages of the ViewPost platform,” he says. 

“We work with suppliers to integrate buyer payments into their preferred workflow for payment acceptance, whether that is paying via the supplier payment portal, an IVR system or third-party network (to support straight-through-processing and other setups that generate payment acceptance efficiency gains),” says Phil. “Our system provides rich remittance details to enhance the supplier’s ability to reconcile and post payments.”

Suppliers benefit from streamlined processes when working with multiple hospitality customers. Rather than managing different payment methods for each relationship, they can optimise based on transaction type and buyer preferences.

Phil challenges the misconception that suppliers always accept payment the same way. Just as consumers switch between cash, cards and digital payments, businesses adjust their preferred payment rails based on circumstances. 

Transaction type, processing efficiency and relationship factors all influence supplier preferences. “As a platform, we have the ability to work with suppliers and understand their preferences by buyer and by type of spend," he explains. “The goal is to put each transaction on the optimal rail for both parties.”

More broadly, Birchstreet recently shared data demonstrating the measurable impact of embedded payments in the industry. According to these case studies, one customer implemented the solution in early 2023 and witnessed notable improvements within 12 months. 

“Seeing the tangible bottom line impact hit the profit and loss statement is very rewarding,” Phil says. “I've been in software a long time. It's often hard to trace the impact on the bottom line. Payments are actually very easy to do.”

Continuing industry innovation

With payment-focused fintechs innovating rapidly, particularly with regards to how supplier data is collated and analysed, Phil eyes two key opportunity areas: the application of machine learning and AI to further accelerate supplier digitisation and global expansion. 

Partnerships, he says, will be key to exploiting both: “The ecosystem partners that are focused on payments are some of the most innovative tech companies in the world.  Our mission is to figure out which partners can deliver the best solutions for hospitality.

“Industry specialisation is key to value delivery and partnerships bring rapid innovation from adjacent verticals and industries that unlock exponential value once integrated, seamlessly, into the BirchStreet application layer and powered by our robust 25+ years of industry data and insights.” 

Global expansion presents a unique challenge. While the hospitality industry has a long history of international operations, the associated payment infrastructure has lagged. 

For Birchstreet, this means creating solutions capable of serving the distinct requirements of markets including the UK and Europe, but also growth regions such as the Middle East and Asia, which bring diverse banking requirements and regulatory frameworks. 

“Hospitality remains a dynamic market with large amounts of innovation and continued global expansion by major brands, GPOs and operators,” Phil says. “Our advantage lies in our industry focus, depth of expertise in hospitality and best-of-breed payment capabilities fit-for-purpose to solve the complexity inherent in the industry.”

Birchstreet’s exclusive focus on hospitality gives it a unique edge ensuring that, beyond payments, its entire suite of capabilities is tailored for those in the industry. 

“When you marry that depth of domain knowledge in hospitality with broad capabilities in procure-to-pay and then embed best-in-class payment capabilities, you're bringing a completely differentiated experience to the end customer,” Phil explains.

That differentiation matters because generic procure-to-pay platforms cannot replicate hospitality-specific functionality. 

When Phil Beck joined BirchStreet in the summer of 2024, he brought years of experience in banking and solving complex payment problems that are proving crucial to the innovative cloud-based payment provider. 

The company is a global market leader in procure-to-pay software-as-a-service for the hospitality industry. Founded over two decades ago, its success is built on enabling hotels, restaurants and food service providers to automate their procurement processes, streamline payments and improve efficiency. 

Phil understands the inherent challenges of this process well. His journey in finance dates back to the mid-1990s, where he worked as a banker at PNC. Being embedded in the industry over subsequent years has seen him work for several companies including FreeMarkets, Ariba and SAP solving sourcing and procure-to-pay challenges. 

“I kept gravitating toward embedded payments as an area that had innate interest for me as a finance person,” he explains. This fascination eventually saw him pivot to Capital One's commercial bank, where he led the treasury function and gained invaluable knowledge as to how large financial institutions solve payment problems at scale and partner with technology companies to embed their solutions. 

Joining Birchstreet gave Phil the opportunity to bring these best practices to an industry in need of modernisation. 

The hospitality sector presents unique challenges. Unlike other industries that have shifted towards digital-first payments, hospitality still relies heavily on manual processes. Cheque payments remain common, creating inefficiencies and increasing fraud risk, as well as leading to friction in supply chain processes. 

Within this context, Phil’s objective is to embed payment capabilities directly into Birchstreet’s procurement platform. “This has been a chance to bring best practices from all sizes and scales into a vertical that has a definite need to modernise and digitise payments,” he says. 

The goal is that, rather than payments being treated as a separate function and the purview of finance departments, data and controls sit where they are most needed: with frontline operators dealing with suppliers every day. 

“We've brought it front and centre to the frontline operator, which changes the dynamic and the experience for that customer,” Phil highlights.

Digitalisation and efficiency in hospitality

Birchstreet serves all the major global hospitality brands alongside property management companies, casinos, food services providers and group purchasing organisations. Its platform, developed through deep collaboration with customers and strategic partners, helps users, suppliers and organisations to optimise processes, transform operations and improve margins. 

The company’s platform enhances business processes by automating eProcurement, AP automation, inventory control, recipe management and analytics.

In order to effectively drive this transformation, Phil has spent much of his first year engaging closely with customers. “They have been great and very welcoming,” he says, “helping to educate me rapidly on the differences that are inherent in the industry.”

Learning hospitality from the inside has revealed operational complexities Phil never experienced as a business traveller. 

For example, one of the biggest challenges has been adapting broad, horizontal payment capabilities for hospitality's specific needs. Birchstreet’s unique value proposition lies in its ability to fine-tune platforms and solutions typically created to serve multiple industries into hospitality-specific solutions. 

The company focuses on three core areas: helping customers digitise payments and move away from cheques; embedding payments within the application layer that both centralised finance teams and decentralised operators use daily; and reducing fraud risk through digitisation.

The latter, says Phil, remains a key challenge with the industry facing growing fraud rates in areas including cheque washing and cheque fraud. Digital technologies provide an effective way of controlling and managing this risk

Creating a global partner ecosystem

Birchstreet relies on close collaboration with strategic technology partners, including payments processors. For example, the company has chosen to embed payments whilst outsourcing the actual payment execution – whether card, cheque or automated clearing house transfers – to specialist partners.

Phil and his team follow a multi-partner approach, working to expand the company’s core partner ecosystem by bringing leading businesses with unique capabilities into the fold – a methodology he says is crucial for delivering best-in-class customer experiences. 

“One of our fastest growing segments is hospitality management companies outside the US, which creates both opportunities and challenges since payments are very regional,” Phil says. 

Different partners help BirchStreet expand geographically while solving specific pain points – some processors excel at machine learning models that identify optimal payment rails and improve supplier enrolment, for example.

Others offer superior capabilities for enterprise customers or the ability to execute payments in specific geographic markets. By maintaining multiple partnerships, BirchStreet can select the best tool for each situation.

“As an industry, hospitality has been expanding rapidly with brands that were previously in one local market now operating on a multi-national or even global scale,” Phil says. 

As hospitality becomes more and more global, it creates complexity for payment execution. Managing payments across these markets requires regional expertise that no single bank or payment processor can deliver alone. Hence the partner ecosystem approach.

Enhancing supplier enrollment with ViewPost

One key partner is ViewPost, a market leader in B2B payments automation that has pioneered next generation, real-time supplier enrollment and conversion from check to virtual card and automated clearing house (ACH). 

“Adding ViewPost to our ecosystem of payment providers expands funding options, enhances supplier onboarding and delivers an embedded experience to all of our customers,” says Phil. “ViewPost offers both pre-fund and check-fund options that allow customers to ‘bring your own bank’ or use our bank partners to initiate disbursements. In addition, they have developed best-in-class real-time supplier enablement capabilities that use AI to prioritise suppliers for onboarding and to facilitate portal/IVR payments.  This simplifies and enhances the supplier enrollment process, driving more card acceptance and higher customer satisfaction.”

ViewPost’s capabilities are embedded within the Birchstreet Pay solution using real-time APIs that send and receive data between platforms and bank partners. This enables direct access for customers without the need for further payment processor integration and brings greater automation and data visibility to customers. 

“Automation of payment execution and visibility of the payment status from initiation through full settlement within the BirchStreet Pay application layer are key benefits derived from utilising our platform,” says Phil.  

“This enables continual optimisation of payments across virtual card, check and ACH rails,” he continues. “It also provides real-time visibility within our UI for all payment events when they occur, enabling front-line operators to self-service supplier payment inquiries, lowering the operational burden on centralised finance teams.”

The company also focuses on helping enterprise customers solve their "last mile" problem – many of these large brands have already achieved 60-80% digitisation, but struggle with the remaining manual payments. 

ViewPost brings specific capabilities for this segment, including advanced technology for converting those final holdouts.

Beck is particularly excited about ViewPost's machine learning capabilities. The company has developed models that analyse and score supplier transactions in real time, using those insights to transform the onboarding experience. 

That data-driven approach represents cutting-edge capability in the payments space.

Delivering tangible success

Collaboration with ViewPost has improved the experience for Birchstreet’s hospitality and procurement clients, helping tackle perennial pain points in the B2B payments process. 

Phil reports benefits including higher customer ROI from payments with lower effort and on accelerated timelines, as well as improved customer experience. The collaboration also brings greater flexibility and real-time, AI-prioritised supplier enablement.

“Early feedback has been very positive, with customers citing faster time-to-value and improved supplier enrollment as key advantages of the ViewPost platform,” he says. 

“We work with suppliers to integrate buyer payments into their preferred workflow for payment acceptance, whether that is paying via the supplier payment portal, an IVR system or third-party network (to support straight-through-processing and other setups that generate payment acceptance efficiency gains),” says Phil. “Our system provides rich remittance details to enhance the supplier’s ability to reconcile and post payments.”

Suppliers benefit from streamlined processes when working with multiple hospitality customers. Rather than managing different payment methods for each relationship, they can optimise based on transaction type and buyer preferences.

Phil challenges the misconception that suppliers always accept payment the same way. Just as consumers switch between cash, cards and digital payments, businesses adjust their preferred payment rails based on circumstances. 

Transaction type, processing efficiency and relationship factors all influence supplier preferences. “As a platform, we have the ability to work with suppliers and understand their preferences by buyer and by type of spend," he explains. “The goal is to put each transaction on the optimal rail for both parties.”

More broadly, Birchstreet recently shared data demonstrating the measurable impact of embedded payments in the industry. According to these case studies, one customer implemented the solution in early 2023 and witnessed notable improvements within 12 months. 

“Seeing the tangible bottom line impact hit the profit and loss statement is very rewarding,” Phil says. “I've been in software a long time. It's often hard to trace the impact on the bottom line. Payments are actually very easy to do.”

Continuing industry innovation

With payment-focused fintechs innovating rapidly, particularly with regards to how supplier data is collated and analysed, Phil eyes two key opportunity areas: the application of machine learning and AI to further accelerate supplier digitisation and global expansion. 

Partnerships, he says, will be key to exploiting both: “The ecosystem partners that are focused on payments are some of the most innovative tech companies in the world.  Our mission is to figure out which partners can deliver the best solutions for hospitality.

“Industry specialisation is key to value delivery and partnerships bring rapid innovation from adjacent verticals and industries that unlock exponential value once integrated, seamlessly, into the BirchStreet application layer and powered by our robust 25+ years of industry data and insights.” 

Global expansion presents a unique challenge. While the hospitality industry has a long history of international operations, the associated payment infrastructure has lagged. 

For Birchstreet, this means creating solutions capable of serving the distinct requirements of markets including the UK and Europe, but also growth regions such as the Middle East and Asia, which bring diverse banking requirements and regulatory frameworks. 

“Hospitality remains a dynamic market with large amounts of innovation and continued global expansion by major brands, GPOs and operators,” Phil says. “Our advantage lies in our industry focus, depth of expertise in hospitality and best-of-breed payment capabilities fit-for-purpose to solve the complexity inherent in the industry.”

Birchstreet’s exclusive focus on hospitality gives it a unique edge ensuring that, beyond payments, its entire suite of capabilities is tailored for those in the industry. 

“When you marry that depth of domain knowledge in hospitality with broad capabilities in procure-to-pay and then embed best-in-class payment capabilities, you're bringing a completely differentiated experience to the end customer,” Phil explains.

That differentiation matters because generic procure-to-pay platforms cannot replicate hospitality-specific functionality. 

Making customers successful

Building on his last year at Birchstreet, Phil’s priority is execution and delivering consistently for customers who have already adopted the platform. At the same time he will work with the company’s partner ecosystem to develop new and best-in-class solutions that enhance the embedded experience further. 

“I get my energy from making customers successful,” he says. “Business in general is all about serving customer needs and solving customer pain points, and we have a great solution that does that.”

Beyond this, Birchstreet’s medium-term focus is to accelerate supplier onboarding, improve customer experience and feed greater volumes of data back into the payment processes – building blocks, he says, that create a strong foundation for differentiation. 

Success for Birchstreet is positioning itself as the hospitality payment platform of choice designed from the ground up to meet the complex needs of the industry. 

“By combining our 25+ years of data and domain expertise in hospitality with best-in-class payments capabilities, we help hotel operators, property managers and GPOs deliver unparalleled value in P2P,” says Phil. 

“We don't want to just bring the best generically, we want to define and build the best embedded payments platform for hospitality. There are a lot of things we're doing that will take time to reach a completely new and differentiated level, but those are the building blocks, that's the path forward.”