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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Automating B2B Accounts Receivable with Thomas Cecil, Co-Founder of PAYRA | Episode 495
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A $400,000 B2B card payment sounds simple until a processor flags it, the finance team cannot reconcile it, and the invoice sits open while DSO creeps up. That gap between delivering product and collecting cash is where B2B payments either become a growth engine or a constant operational headache.
I sits down with Thomas Cecil, Co-Founder of PAYRA, to unpack how modern accounts receivable automation actually works when you have real scale like thousands of invoices per month and customers paying by card, ACH, wire, or check. We talk through PAYRA’s approach to the invoice-to-cash cycle, why deep ERP integrations matter more than glossy dashboards, and how automated payment reconciliation into the general ledger eliminates the manual posting that blocks adoption. Thomas also explains the practical details finance teams care about, like handling surcharging and posting to multiple GL entries without breaking the books.
We also zoom out to where B2B payments is headed: partnering with ISOs instead of trying to replace them, using AI agents to pull invoice metadata from legacy ERPs with limited APIs, and the growing opportunity in cross-border receivables. Thomas shares why stablecoins may reduce correspondent banking friction and why workflows and value-added services are becoming the real business model behind payments.
Welcome And What To Expect
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast, where we talk to sea level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
SPEAKER_01Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers. And today's special guest is Thomas Seestel, co-founder of Payra. So, Thomas, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, Greg. It's great to be here and big fan of your show, and it's an honor.
SPEAKER_01Appreciate
Thomas Cecil’s Background
SPEAKER_01it. So before we dive into your career and talk about the company, can you give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. I'm from Asheville, North Carolina. So from the mountains. And today I go between Miami and Nashville. Our headquarters is in Nashville, but I've been in South Florida for five years and really love it there. From Asheville, and then to move down to Florida and think I'm just going to continue going back between Nashville and Florida for the time being. But that's my background.
SPEAKER_01Two cool places,
From College Startup To Payments
SPEAKER_01that's for sure. So if you don't mind, can you walk us through your professional journey and maybe how and why you started Payra?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Taking those in parts, my professional journey, it started actually like kind of a young age. So when I was 19, I was an undergrad at Dartmouth. I honestly just kind of fell into payments. That will be a good sequitur to Payra and where we're at now. But that would have been 12 years ago almost. So I was an undergrad at the time, and I just sort of always thought of myself for whatever reason as like I was going to just build a business. That's just what I wanted to do. And so while I was in college, I started an online ordering service. One of my friends, Jason, was I think the first intern at DoorDash. So he basically kind of came back from his summer internship and was like, hey, I know you want to start a business. This thing's going on. You may want to do it, but for Boston or do it for Hanover. Long story short is I started an online ordering service, and then I surprisingly did pretty well. It had a couple hundred restaurants on it, and it could support me like after college. But I was worried that I might lose clients if I didn't integrate to their point of sale systems. So this is like NCR and older systems like Squirrel and stuff. Actually, how I got into payments is I started integrating with these historically very challenging systems to integrate into. Eventually, Elivan found me and was like, hey, who do you write all your deals to for payments? And I was like, what do you mean? And they were like, well, yeah, we can give you a residual if you board it with us. And I was like, great, yeah, happy to. Don't even think I looked at the percentage, signed it, and then 45 days later, you get your first residual. I was like, hold on. This is a much bigger number than what I'm charging people on the software fees. It's funny, like, I'm very blessed that I like sort of fell into this industry that way. But ever since getting that first experience, I've never left the industry. And I ended up bootstrapping that business and selling it to National Computer Corporation in 2019. Soon after that started Clyde AI, which was more on the issuance side of the payments business. So we were a lead gen aggregator for all the top banks, Amex, Chase, et cetera. And I ended up selling that business in 2022 to a company called Array, which is a very impressive large credit identity infrastructure provider. They work with the DOD, a bunch of state governments, big companies in the US. Those are my prior two experiences. And then Peyra, being from Asheville, and my co-founder Riley, who's equally as important for this story, he's from eastern Tennessee. I'm from Western North Carolina. So when you think about payments, B2B payments, those are just businesses from where we're from. Like there's a lot of manufacturing, whether it be windows or like aggregate materials, like the ingredients that go into cement or rocks for homes or drywalls. That was basically the exposure that I grew up with. And after I sort of left array, I really wanted to do something in B2B payments for two reasons. One, I kind of view that outside of the stable coin space as like kind of one of the last frontiers where there's, in my opinion, genuine green space in that market. That's where I wanted to focus my efforts. And thankfully, my co-founder and I have good relationships and I think really understand those type of businesses. So we got put in touch by a football guy named He Schuler, who I used to work out with, and he went to Tennessee, and my co-founder Riley went to Tennessee. So basically we decided, hey, let's start this thing with Payra, and you'll hear more about that in a second. But we incorporated that business. We just passed our two-year anniversary, so it's been pretty remarkable.
SPEAKER_01Okay, well, why don't you go ahead and tell us what Payra does?
What PAYRA Does For AR
SPEAKER_02PayRA basically automates the invoice to cash cycle. In B2B payments, there's two primary workflows, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners already know this. But for retail payments, you're getting the service or your product and you're paying at the same time. Well, for B2B payments, there's typically a lag in between delivery of service and collection of payment, that 30, 60, whatever. For us, what we end up really solving for our clients is we're not just the processor, but we actually give them value-added solutions, whether that be like invoicing modules. And we also have, in my opinion, the most extensive direct integrations with ERPs. So we support, I think, 12 now. And that's been really big for us because we automate the reconciliation of all those payments into the general ledger of the ERP. That's ultimately kind of the gatekeeper for those large businesses. A lot of them want to accept credit card or they want to do ACH instead of just getting a wire check. But the real issue is for those businesses at that sort of scale, our clients might be doing 15,000 invoices a month. If it's not reconciling automatically, it's too much work for them. What we end up doing is we're fully integrated. We do everything from card acquiring. We're a third-party sender of ACH, ourselves internally. And that's kind of an uncommon path. So I can tell you a little bit why we did that. And then obviously our application, and then most importantly, our the ERP partners that allow us to integrate with them and so on and so forth.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Well, what do you think the biggest challenge is that your company is solving for for your customers?
Large Tickets DSO And Reconciliation
SPEAKER_02For our customers, we have two types of customers. So the first and foremost would be those B2B businesses. Those are direct sales, right? That's how we started the business. What we're really solving for them is enhancing and accelerating their cash flow. So think about like the type of business that we work with. They typically are selling large quantities of physical products and they're high ticket. What I mean by that is just the purchase amount is significant. So the top three things that we solve for them are one, you'd be surprised, like a lot of acquirers or processors actually struggle to let large ticket transactions go through. And the reason for that is really like fraud and risk controls. If I was a bad actor and I got hold of an invoicing system and I just went and just tried to draft a bunch of accounts, I would presumably want to do that in a very large amount of money, right? So the first thing we solve for them is we have bespoke risk and fraud settings because we integrate with the ERP that we can say, hey, this 400,000 credit card order of Windows, we can actually validate that this is real because we're seeing the source of truth in the ERP. So we let it go through. So one is just acceptance. The second, and probably the biggest of all of these, is we are significantly driving DSO or day sales outstanding down for our customers. They get their money faster. And why that's really important is a lot of our businesses rely heavily on bank debt, buy trucks, inventory, new plants, et cetera. So it's really important that they do get paid on time. And the third is automated reconciliation, what I mentioned earlier. So to my knowledge, I think payroll is really one of the only solutions that can write to multiple GL entries. So in B2B, surcharging is very popular, dual pricing, if you want to call it. And a big reason why we're able to help these customers is they're like, hey, we'd love to accept credit cards, but also I don't have a huge net income margin, so I need to pass off from the customer. And I can't find anybody that can split the card surcharge fee to an expense GL account and the corpus of the invoice to my accounts receivable. That was a long way of saying we take care of all the manual data entry for them. We increase the cash flow of the business, and we enable them really to accept card and ACH for larger transactions.
SPEAKER_01Well, you mentioned one thing there that is sort of unique that you do, but what else differentiates
Partnering With ISOs Instead Of Competing
SPEAKER_01you from your competitors?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think a big thing for us is when you think about the ISO market, for example, like Stripe and Addin are what I would consider to be like two of the greatest processors out there in terms of technology stack, but they don't make their technology available to ISOs. So one of the biggest differentiators now is humbly, we've had a lot of success with the direct sales, but we started as an ISO. We know that market, we know sort of the needs. And the reality is the ISO market has great sales force. They know the business well. A lot of them have really strong regional contacts. And what I think makes payroll so unique at this juncture in our career is we're really trying to partner open arms with ISOs and say, hey, this is a market that's completely inaccessible to you. Like unless you want to invest the millions of dollars in direct integrations and licensing fees and whatever with all these ERPs, is you can partner with us and we recognize the value that you're bringing. You're bringing the customer, the relationship, maybe there's some support aspect to it. So one of the bigger differentiators for me is we want to partner with the ISO market instead of like competing head on, which typically is a more modern software approach, is just to like say, hey, we're just gonna do it all ourselves and we don't want to partner.
Cross Border Growth And Mexico
SPEAKER_01Okay, well, let's talk about the future a little bit. Where do you see the biggest growth opportunity in that B2B segment of payments?
SPEAKER_02For payments as a whole, I think cross-border is gonna become increasingly more important. If you think about the US and Mexico as an example, like Mexico's our largest trade partner. It's even bigger than China, right? It's like a trillion dollars of goods a year. I don't know many companies from the AR side that are tackling that. You've seen a lot of really great adoption from the AP players on using stable coins or FX pairs basically to help with the vendor pay outside. I haven't seen that many successful companies do it for receivables. So I think that's a huge opportunity. And that will come more into focus for pay, I think, over the next few years. But for us right now, like we're really focused on just getting a roster of amazing ISO partners and growing our direct sales team. We're still a pretty small company. We're about 40 employees, but we think we'll probably be about double that by the end of the year. So we're just really focused on our systems and helping our customers out.
SPEAKER_01Well, what does success look like for Payra over, say, the next three to five years?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's a great question. Riley and I would like to build a business that has a billion dollars in top line revenue. That's our shared goal. I don't know if we'll get there in the next five years, but the really exciting thing for us, Greg, is this will be now my third sort of payments company. And I always say this to the team, I can promise you I work just as hard for the other ones as I'm working now. But sometimes you really are in the right time and in the right place. I just genuinely feel like Payra is a big beneficiary of that. Unpacking that, a lot of these larger established companies in the US are currently in buying cycles. Maybe that's partly for AI and they're hearing about all the benefits, blah, blah, blah. But what we've noticed is like there's a lot of propensity for large American established companies, particularly in the B2B segment, where they're looking for new solutions. So one of the big successes for us is doubling down and helping them deliver modern software, modern AR collections in in their ERP. That's our near-term goal. I think that would be successful if we can just continue to create market share there. That's kind of what really excites me is there are some great competitors in this space, but it's a lot more greenfield than you would think.
SPEAKER_01Well, let's step back a little bit and talk about the broader industry.
AI Agents For Legacy ERPs
SPEAKER_01And you've already brought up some of the trends, but what do you see as some of the biggest trends? And I know AI is such a buzzword, but I think when people think about AI, it's a lot of how does it help me do my job kind of thing. And then if you get into payments, we talk a lot about fraud and how it's helping identify fraud and those kind of things. I think in the B2B, and this is just Greg Myers talking, but I think in the B2B payment space, AI has a lot of opportunities, right? Having agents do a lot of the things that happen in a transaction that maybe are more manual today. So one, I'm curious about your thoughts on AI when it comes to B2B payments. And then you mentioned a couple others, stablecoin, cross-border. I mean, those obviously are huge things in your space. So just curious if you want to double down on some of those. That'd be great.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. First, since it's on the top of everyone's head, AI does actually have a pretty large role to play here in payments across the board horizontally, anti-fraud and all that good stuff. Those systems are just gonna keep getting better and better, especially as the data sets increase. But for us in particular, we actually use agents inside of Payra to access and handle some of the workload for the what I would call more legacy ERPs, which I'll spare you the names because they're partners of ours. But Payra has a very large segment of our business, are not necessarily on-prem. It may be cloud hosted, but they don't have sufficient APIs. You may not be able to get the invoice number. You may not be able to get customer details in order to send the invoice. You know, you don't know the status, right? There's a lot of metadata that goes into sending an invoice, actually. And if the ERP is not extremely like API documented forward, which some of the modern ones are, but the biggest ones aren't, AI plays a big role for us because we're able to get that information out of the ERP reliably, generate the invoice. That's like been the big fusion for us is we go into systems that typically there have been no electronic capture. And these are huge businesses. Like we have a couple companies that are north of a billion dollars in volume a year. It's not they didn't want to accept it. It was like, all right, well, it has to reconcile with the ERP. And without LLMs and agents that literally take up a seat in that ERP and help us pull the data out. So for us, that's the biggest one right now. To double down on one, I'm definitely a big believer in stable coins. More so for piping to somewhat replace or just help enable building off of the correspondent banking system is just brutal for cross-border. So I look at the almost those things as the same. A lot of our clients have manufacturing subsidiaries in Mexico that they buy from their subsidiaries, they sell to even some of their competitors, and it's constantly a pain for them to do acceptance there. So I think stable coins will be really valuable in reducing a lot of the friction behind the scenes for correspondent banking and deliver a more simple, elegant solution for someone who's just trying to pay an invoice and they might be in a different country or whatever. I think those are the two biggest things that come to mind for me.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01Well, a couple of final questions before we wrap
Advice And The Future Of Payments
SPEAKER_01up. So you have a very interesting background as far as you never worked for the big company, right? You've been a very entrepreneurial, started company, sold them. But if you could go back and give yourself some advice at the start of your career, what would that be?
SPEAKER_02You know, I think the advice would be stay extremely close to your customers. Earlier in my career, I think it's very romantic to think about this Steve Jobsian product. This product's perfect and the edges are great. It's a great marketing pitch. But at the end of the day, what customers really want is a solution to a specific problem. And if you're not close to your customer, you're not going to know what those solutions are. And case in point with that, I didn't do that particularly well for point of sale systems 12 years ago. Now I feel like we do that really well. And you just be really surprised at how open people will be and say, like, hey, these are the problems I have, you can solve it. Like that's valuable to me. I'm happy to reward you. So I think that's the fastest path to building a company and sort of getting out of the random walk, as they call it, for like finding product market fit. Stay close to the customers.
SPEAKER_01Okay. That's never bad advice, no matter who you are and what you're doing. And especially in payments, right? We have a lot of people out there that are listening that are in the payments industry. What's the one thing that they should be thinking about right now?
SPEAKER_02I think the one thing to think about is payments is the rail to monetize what you've built, but it's not the end solution. What I mean by that is like you've got to be providing value-added services. I mean, we've seen this, of course, for the vertical SaaS boom, like Service Titan, et cetera. Like Service Titan and Shopify are payments companies. They own a workflow, but they make all their money on payments. So I feel like that's really the future of the industry. That's pretty clear. And thankfully, there's a lot of wonderful and smart people in payments, and they already know that. It's probably obvious to them. But top of mind, to me, what I think it should be for them is find a way to partner where you can deliver and own a workflow for a customer. So we don't do point of sale, but if you're selling your retail ISO and you're selling to Main Street, you might need to partner with Clover. You might need to partner with one of the point of sale providers. If you're in B2B and you want to do ERP payments, hopefully that's us. But I think payments is really just becoming an economic model. And it's not sufficient enough to just be like, oh, I cleared and sell the transaction. Well, it's like, okay, well, what else can you do for me? Because I already have a guy that does that. You think you want to position it as like a value-added provider and really understand the pain points that you're solving for that customer.
SPEAKER_01Well, before we wrap up, if you don't mind, maybe just summarize what Payra does in a sentence or two and then let everyone know the easiest way to get in touch with you
PAYRA Summary And How To Reach Them
SPEAKER_01guys.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Payra automates invoice to cash cycle. Think of AR invoice reconciliation into ERPs. And the best way to get in touch with us is to email my co-founder. He handles all the commercial partnerships with payment companies, ISOs, et cetera, which is Riley at payra.com. We really look forward to some great partnerships coming out of an awesome talk with you.
SPEAKER_01Well, Thomas, thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here today.
SPEAKER_02Oh, of course, it's an amazing platform that you have, and I'm honored that you would have me.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersandpayments.com where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.