Most public conversation about payments focuses on the consumer-facing names — Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Block — and on newer instant rails such as FedNow and RTP. A different layer of the payments market, arguably larger by dollar value, tends to receive less attention: the B2B disbursement infrastructure that businesses use to move money between one another.
Federal Reserve data provides some sense of scale. According to Federal Reserve Payments Study figures cited in a December 2025 request for information from the Board of Governors, U.S. individuals and organizations wrote more than 11 billion checks in 2021, and by value business checks accounted for more than three-quarters of all commercial check volume. Data cited by the Federal Reserve Payments Study also indicates that between 2018 and 2021, consumer check usage declined at roughly 9.8% per year while business check usage declined at approximately 4.0% per year, meaning business check volumes have persisted longer than consumer volumes.
Rail innovation and enterprise reality
New payment rails often generate more industry attention than early enterprise adoption. FedNow, which the Federal Reserve launched in July 2023, provides a recent example. According to reporting in the ABA Banking Journal and Federal Reserve updates, more than 1,500 financial institutions had joined the network within two years of launch, but the majority were live in receive-only mode, with sender adoption trailing behind. The Federal Reserve has described broad adoption of the service across the roughly 9,000 U.S. financial institutions as a gradual journey, comparable in pace to the rollout of FedACH in prior decades.
CheckIssuing, a B2B disbursement infrastructure provider, offers one example of how companies in this category are approaching enterprise adoption. For enterprise treasury and finance teams, the practical question after a new rail launches is often not whether it is fast enough, but whether it can be integrated with existing accounting, compliance, and reconciliation processes without disrupting workflows that already function.
What enterprise buyers tend to evaluate
Public discussions of payment infrastructure often emphasize speed and rail choice. Buyers responsible for evaluating and integrating payment infrastructure tend to place additional weight on a set of operational qualities: compliance posture (frameworks such as SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, and the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework), integration depth with existing finance systems, audit-trail quality, and the ability to handle exceptions at scale.
Providers in the category have generally developed toward orchestration across multiple rails and modalities — checks, ACH, wires, and instant payments — rather than differentiating on rail speed alone. This shift mirrors patterns seen in adjacent categories such as card acceptance, where providers like Stripe and Adyen built positions in part by absorbing operational complexity that merchants had previously managed themselves.
A case example
CheckIssuing is a Tempe, Arizona-based disbursement infrastructure company that has operated since 2008 and is one of several providers active in this segment. The company offers check printing, outsourced mailing, ACH workflows, and disbursement automation for clients across enterprise, healthcare, marketplace, and financial services segments. Its CEO, Mark Greenspan, has described enterprise adoption in the category as tending toward long-tenured relationships, in which customers integrate infrastructure into finance and payroll workflows and adjust it over time rather than replacing it at regular intervals.
The B2B disbursement segment as a whole remains relatively fragmented, with a mix of larger and smaller providers. It is unusual in combining physical operations, such as printing and mail handling, with digital infrastructure, such as APIs and compliance frameworks.
Implications for enterprise fintech adoption
The material above suggests that, for fintech companies serving enterprise buyers, the pace and shape of adoption may be influenced as much by operational depth and integration quality as by rail speed. Companies that develop capabilities in compliance, exception handling, and system integration tend to become embedded in customer finance operations, which can affect the trajectory of the category over time.
Whether B2B disbursement continues to develop along similar lines will depend on several factors, including the rate at which enterprises adopt instant rails, ongoing regulatory developments, and how quickly incumbent processes evolve. Observers of the space may find the category develops differently from the consumer-facing payment names that dominate current coverage.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Readers should conduct their own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions. Any companies mentioned are referenced solely as illustrative examples of activity in the category and not as recommendations.
Sources referenced include the Federal Reserve Payments Study, the December 2025 Federal Reserve Board of Governors Request for Information on the Future of the Federal Reserve Banks’ Check Services, ABA Banking Journal reporting on FedNow adoption (October 2025), and publicly available information from CheckIssuing.
