Why digital payment boom is straining enterprise ERPs

MANILA, Philippines —  According to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), digital payments accounted for 57.4 percent of monthly retail transaction volume and 59 percent of value in 2024, driven by widespread QR Ph adoption and mature e-wallet networks. Accepting digital payments is no longer the challenge.

The real bottleneck now lies behind the scenes.

While payments are completed instantly, many companies still manually reconcile transactions across multiple banks and payment providers before they can be reflected in their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and accounting systems.

For chief financial officers and treasury teams in industries such as insurance, manufacturing, lending and real estate, the rapid growth of digital payments has created a new operational challenge.

Because many large companies use multiple payment providers, finance teams often have to reconcile transactions manually across different bank portals and dashboards. The result is disconnected spreadsheets, higher labor costs, greater risk of errors and delays in cash visibility.

This creates a costly gap between the moment a customer completes a payment and the moment the funds are reconciled and reflected in the company’s ERP system.

To address this, fintech firms are shifting their focus from payment acceptance to enterprise back-end infrastructure.

SwiftPay, for instance, integrates payment collection, disbursements, virtual accounts and automated reconciliation into a single platform that works with an enterprise’s existing systems.

“The industry spent years focusing on payment acceptance and point-of-sale hardware,” said Damian Gil, chief revenue officer of SwiftPay. “For complex enterprises, the bigger challenge is what happens after the payment.”

Rather than replacing existing financial systems, newer platforms integrate with a company’s current banking relationships and ERP software.

SwiftPay enables banks and enterprises to collect, route, reconcile and settle transactions across major Philippine payment rails through a single integration, helping automate back-office processes and improve cash-flow visibility.