Why are UK businesses still chasing bank transfers?

There’s a moment every business owner knows. The work is done, the invoice is out, and now you’re a wee bit of a debt collector — checking the bank each morning, drafting the polite nudge, wondering whether a second nudge looks desperate.

The Inevitable Shift — the report commissioned by Glass Atlas and Commerce in association with PayPal, with YouGov surveying 500 UK B2B decision-makers in July 2025 — put numbers on how businesses actually pay each other. Bank transfer leads at 60%. Purchase orders and invoices: 46%. Credit or debit card: 40%. Then direct debit at 26%, PayPal at 22%, trade credit at 16% and buy-now-pay-later at 8%.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a bank transfer. It’s free, it’s familiar, and everyone trusts it. The problem was never the method.

The transfer is free. The chasing isn’t.

An invoice paid by transfer is really a chain of small manual jobs: raise it, send it, watch for it, match it against the right job, chase it, chase it again. Each link takes minutes. Across a month they take hours — and the chasing carries a cost no spreadsheet shows, because it’s the one job that feels bad to do. For a small firm, late money isn’t a rounding error either. It’s the cash flow.

Flexibility is a closing tool, not a finance detail

Here’s the finding I’d pin on the wall: 65% of large B2B businesses — the ones with 250+ employees and an entire credit-control function — say payment flexibility is important to closing deals. Sit with who’s saying that. Firms that can afford to be rigid have concluded that being easy to pay wins them business. If that’s true with a finance department, it’s truer without one.

The same survey found 52% of businesses now identify as hybrid — selling both online and offline. Every extra channel multiplies the payment admin, unless something systematic is holding it.

Make it easier to pay you than to owe you

Firstly, put the payment inside the invoice: a card or instant-payment link on the document itself, so paying takes one tap rather than a login and a sort code. Secondly, move anything recurring — retainers, maintenance, support — onto direct debit, and stop re-earning the same payment every month. Thirdly, hand the reminders to a system: polite, consistent, on a schedule. The tone can stay yours. The persistence becomes the machine’s, and you only step in for the genuinely stuck.

That last pattern — a human’s judgement, a system’s persistence — is most of what we build. If you want to know which admin your business is carrying that a system could hold, our free audit is where we’d start.

Overall: the money usually arrives eventually. The hours you spend walking it to the door don’t come back. Because the cost of a bank transfer was never the transfer.