Why B2B Payments Aren't About Payments

Stablecoin rails settle in seconds. Wire transfers take days. Neither helps if you're disputing the amount.

Cross-border B2B payments are having a moment. Stablecoins promise instant settlement. Fees measured in cents, not percentages. No correspondent banks, no SWIFT delays, no timezone friction.

The pitch is compelling. The problem is it's solving the wrong thing.

The 10-Second Payment That Takes 90 Days

Telecom carriers buy and sell network capacity from each other—billions in transactions annually. When Verizon needs a circuit in a region they don't cover, they buy it wholesale from someone who does. Both sides run their own billing systems, their own records, their own version of the truth.

A carrier receives an invoice for $156,000. Their records show $148,500. Dispute initiated.

Now it doesn't matter if payment settles in 10 seconds or 10 days. The next 90 days will be spent in spreadsheets, correlating order IDs, pulling up email threads, trying to figure out where the $7,500 discrepancy originated.

Was it the quote? The order? A change request that one party recorded and the other didn't? Nobody knows. The data lives in two different systems that never talked to each other.

Faster rails don't help here. The payment isn't the bottleneck. Agreement is.

Where Disputes Actually Come From

Invoice disputes don't start at the invoice. They surface there. The actual divergence happens earlier:

The invoice dispute isn't about the invoice. It's about a mismatch at quote—months earlier—that nobody caught.

By the time the invoice arrives, both parties have built months of operations on top of that original disagreement. Unwinding it is archaeology.

The Problem Isn't the Payment

Matt Brown observed that B2B payments are really workflow problems. Companies like Loop (freight) and Nickel (construction) win by solving the workflow that precedes the payment—invoice auditing, tax calculation—then processing the payment as a natural consequence.

In telecom, the workflow problem is different. It's not internal process (tax rules, approval chains). It's bilateral agreement: two companies, running the same business process, maintaining independent records that slowly diverge.

The workflow isn't broken inside either company. It's broken between them.

Why This Keeps Happening

When Carrier A sells a circuit to Carrier B, both run their own systems:

• Carrier A records the quote in their CRM

• Carrier B records it in theirs

• Nobody verifies they match

Multiply this across every phase—quote, order, delivery, invoice—and discrepancies accumulate silently. Each party believes their records are correct. Both are operating in good faith. But their systems never confirmed agreement.

The invoice is the first moment both parties compare notes. By then, it's too late to cheaply fix anything.

The Fix Isn't Faster Settlement

Instant payment rails are a solution to a different problem (correspondent banking friction, FX delays, cash flow timing). They're valuable. But they don't touch the agreement problem.

What actually reduces disputes:

1. Verification at origin — When both parties submit a quote, confirm they match before anyone proceeds

2. Locked checkpoints — Once verified, that agreement is immutable; downstream phases inherit it

3. Early mismatch detection — If quote doesn't match, surface it in minutes, not months

By the time you reach settlement, there's nothing left to dispute. The payment amount isn't a negotiation—it's the inevitable result of every prior phase already being verified.

The Payment Is the Easy Part

Stablecoins, RTP, FedNow—these are real improvements to payment infrastructure. Use them.

But don't confuse payment speed with payment readiness. A 10-second settlement is only valuable when both parties already agree on the amount. Without that, you've just accelerated the initiation of a dispute.

The hard part of B2B payments isn't moving money. It's earning the right to move it—by proving, at every step, that both parties agree on what's owed.

Solve that, and the payment is just paperwork.

Interweave builds bilateral verification for inter-carrier settlement. We make the agreement problem disappear so the payment can be instant.