Why Incentives Matter More Than Tech in B2B Payments

Whether we admit it or not, every B2B payment interaction is a multiplayer game.

And right now, most players are locked in a zero-sum mindset—optimizing their own position at the cost of everyone else’s. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The future of B2B payments belongs to those who can design better games—using incentives as game mechanics, aligned to human psychology, trust-building, and shared outcomes.

Why Game Design? Because It’s Already Rewiring Minds

Think about the most addictive, elegant games:

• Duolingo turns learning into streaks and Experience Points (XP).
• Airbnb turns hospitality into a reputation game.
• Uber gamifies driver supply with surge pricing and bonus tiers.

Game designers don't force behavior.

They nudge it, shape it, and reward it—using principles baked into human nature:

• Progression loops trigger dopamine.
• Variable rewards keep us engaged.
• Status ladders drive competition.
• Skin in the game increases commitment.

Now apply that lens to payments.
Right now, B2B payments resemble a broken game:

• No shared scoreboard.
• Perverse incentives (e.g., treasury KPIs that reward delayed payouts).
• Unclear rules, hidden costs, and zero feedback loops.

Incentive Design Is the Game Engine for Coordination

Incentives aren’t just about rewards.

They are the mechanics of mindset engineering.

Well-designed incentives shape:

• How people perceive risk and reward
• What habits they normalize or avoid
• Where they focus attention
• How they interpret success

Most B2B payment platforms over-invest in technology and under-invest in psychology.

They perfect their APIs, engineer their ledgers, obsess over fees, but forget that the real adoption engine runs on something quieter: incentives.

What If Incentives Are the Root Protocol?

Every payment product is a negotiation with trust, effort, and reward.

• Why do certain suppliers refuse to switch to your virtual card program, even when it’s faster and more secure?
• Why does your channel partner keep pushing wires instead of embedded payouts, despite higher margins on your product?
• Why does your CFO hesitate to greenlight a new treasury integration that could improve cash visibility by 50%?

It’s rarely about the tech. It’s about the incentives underneath.

When people’s motivations are misaligned with your product's logic, the system stalls—quietly.

Your CAC rises. Your LTV plateaus.

Your margins shrink under the weight of friction.

You lose mindshare to platforms that design incentives that just feel easier to trust and adopt.

Incentives As Architecture

In B2B payments, complexity is often confused with sophistication.

But the real sophistication lies in clarity. And clarity comes from designing systems where the reward logic is so obvious, so frictionless, that everyone in the value chain moves instinctively toward aligned outcomes.

Let’s say you're launching a working capital product embedded in a mid-market ERP. Your go-to-market depends on:

• Resellers educating CFOs and controllers.
• Implementation partners integrating cleanly.
• Internal CS and ops teams supporting edge cases without friction.

You could brute-force adoption with high-pressure sales scripts and escalated support.

Or you could ask:

What’s the clearest path to everyone getting what they value most—without needing to beg for it?

That’s incentive design.

Let's diagnose and rewire incentive misfires before they calcify into churn, workarounds, or stalled growth.

Where Friction Starts

All B2B platforms have foundational constraints. But many mistake those constraints for complexity that users must simply “deal with.”

Take marketplace payouts.

Imagine you’re scaling in Southeast Asia. You’ve partnered with local logistics aggregators and built a beautiful multi-currency disbursement engine.

But every driver has a different bank, half prefer cash, and your reconciliation happens weekly.

Now your partners complain: “We need a better dashboard.”

But it's not a dashboard problem. It’s a physics problem—you've built for liquidity control, but not for payout transparency.

Your partners bear the uncertainty, and the reward structure isn’t worth the headache. So they quietly push business back to your competitor.

Physics/Real-world constraints teach us this: Incentives that ignore real-world friction don’t scale. They decay.

What People Actually Do

When incentives fail, people make up their own operating logic.

A finance lead might still run manual journal entries because the automation system doesn’t allow for custom exceptions.

A sales team might only sell the flagship product because the bundled offer’s commission is lower—even though it’s more profitable for the business long-term.

These micro-decisions cost more than they seem. Over time, they bleed into your CAC, increase implementation time, and bury your true product value beneath a culture of patchwork workarounds.

Rituals reveal where your incentives are failing to earn trust.
If your LTV is flat, ask:

Where are our people doing invisible labor just to make the system work? And what is that silent cost doing to our margins and morale?

Behavior Over Output

You don’t want users who just transact—you want users who evangelize, embed, and expand.

Great incentive design doesn’t just reward output. It builds momentum by rewarding aligned behavior.

Let’s say you're rolling out a new API for treasury teams. Early adoption is slow. Internally, you're pushing for volume metrics.

But what if the real unlock is confidence?

• Your best-performing client set up a webhook for automated fund sweeps within two days.
• Your worst churn came from teams who stalled for three weeks waiting on internal compliance sign-off.

So you redesign the incentive:

Provide real-time test environments with “safe money” simulations. Shorten the approval path by showing finance leaders audit trails upfront.

Offer white-glove onboarding for users who hit key behavior milestones, not just volume thresholds.

Now your teams aren’t just transacting. They’re teaching each other. Referring others. Integrating deeper.

That’s not just lower CAC—it’s compounding retention.

Trust That Scales

A payments ecosystem grows when every stakeholder can see the reward—and trust that it’s real.

But too often, systems get in the way. Delayed partner payouts. Inaccurate dashboards. Legal contracts that take 45 days. Support tickets routed to nowhere.

Now imagine a better system:

• A PSP that gives ISO partners real-time earnings dashboards and instant payouts on verified transaction volume.
• A B2B SaaS with a network referral loop that triggers product credits and in-app promotion for power users.
• A card issuing platform that gives CFOs a live view of rebate accrual and lets them simulate rebate trade-offs between faster payment terms and cash back.

Every system design decision is also an incentive design decision.

Are your systems silently signaling “wait and see,” or “move fast and win”?

The Story People Tell

A well-designed incentive doesn’t just reward a behavior. It rewrites the story people tell themselves about your platform.

I recently worked with a platform that offered early-pay discounts to buyers. Technically elegant. But no one used it—because suppliers called it a “cash trap.” They felt they were trading value for desperation.

We reframed it. Instead of “discounting,” we positioned it as a treasury yield tool for suppliers—letting them manage receivables like a portfolio.

We created an incentive: the top 10 most optimized suppliers each quarter got benchmark dashboards and early access to FX features.

Adoption soared.
The feature didn’t change. The metaphor did.

And with it, the revenue.

Considerations for leaders:

• Where are we leaking CAC because our incentives ask too much for too little reward?
• What trusted behaviors (not just transactions) do we want to design for in year one—and year three?
• Are we giving partners and users real-time visibility into how value is shared?
• What are the quiet stories our users tell each other about using us—and what incentives reinforce those stories?

Great incentive design increases LTV, lowers CAC, reduces churn, and unlocks compound adoption. But more than that, it shapes the culture of your ecosystem.

Incentives are infrastructure.

Treat them with the same seriousness you give to code, compliance, and capital.

The ROI of Incentive-Native Thinking

Here’s what we’ve seen across the advisory portfolio:

You’re Already Playing a Game—Design a Better One

The most powerful design decision in any multiplayer system is incentive alignment.

Do it badly, and you get:

• Float hoarding
• Invoice disputes
• Vendor churn
• Treasury stress
• Innovation drag

Do it well, and you unlock:

• Liquidity flywheels
• Trust dividends
• Ecosystem cooperation
• Strategic speed
• Economic surplus

These essays are analyses of my experience leading UX at some of the leading B2B fintech builders globally. Interested in working with me in a deeper capacity? Hit the "Contact" button below!