From payment processing to business advantage
Transforming back-office payments into a CFO's growth lever
The brief
Sell two B2B payment products in a category where everyone promises faster cash flow and lower costs.
The reframe
CFOs use working capital to fund growth. The products already delivered that, so the messaging had to move from what they do to what they make possible.
My role
Strategist, Dentsu Creative
I led brand and sales enablement for American Express Global Commercial Services, and built monthly competitive intelligence across nine major financial brands.
Figures
- 2
- 9
- From: Working capitalTo: Investing in the future
- From: Process efficiencyTo: Smarter decisions for everyone
- From: Enrollment supportTo: Best-in-class partnership
The full case
- American Express had built serious B2B payment products — Buyer Initiated Payments for large corporate buyers, One AP for accounts-payable automation — but the messaging sold them as plumbing. Feature lists, processing language, short-term promises. Every competitor said the same things: accelerate cash flow, collect money faster, lower costs. When the whole category talks about immediate benefits, products that actually deliver long-term strategic value get evaluated like commodities — and B2B buyers default to whoever looks cheapest or fastest.
- The gap was hiding in plain sight. Competitors had claimed every short-term benefit, which left the long-term story wide open — and that’s where the real buying decision lives. CFOs weren’t just trying to move money faster; they were using working capital to fund growth and plan for what’s next. The products already delivered that. The messaging needed to catch up — from what the products do to what they make possible.
- For BIP, three deliberate shifts: Working Capital becomes Investing in the Future, Process Efficiency becomes Smarter Decisions for Everyone, Enrollment Support becomes Best-in-Class Partnership — each mapped to where the buyer is in their journey, from the first “I need a better way to manage supplier payments” moment to the final business case. For One AP, a key message built on the one thing challenger fintechs couldn’t credibly own at Amex’s scale: control. Supported by three value pillars and built from field-team interviews on the inside and competitive analysis on the outside.
- Started with discovery, not writing: competitive mapping across e-payables, traditional banks, and fintechs; research into how financial decision-makers actually think about working capital; field interviews with the teams hearing objections firsthand. The pattern that emerged — a category selling short-term wins to buyers planning for the long term — became the strategy. Frameworks were built, pressure-tested against client feedback, revised, then codified into playbooks so every marketer and agency partner tells the same story the same way.
- Two messaging playbooks that turned strategy into an operating system: key messages, pillar-level messaging with reasons to believe, customer-journey maps showing which message lands at awareness versus consideration versus engagement, and messaging dos and don’ts. The BIP work ladders up through the B2B Payments Solutions story into the broader commercial payments value narrative — one consistent story from product feature to portfolio.