How BILL is becoming the financial backbone of the SMB economy

For most small and midsize businesses, financial operations remain a tangle of disconnected systems: A payroll platform over here, an ERP over there, and a manual AP process stitching them together with spreadsheets. 

BILL has spent the past year making a systematic argument that this doesn’t have to be the case. Through a rapid series of embedded partnerships and a suite of AI Agents, the San Jose-based fintech is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer that powers intelligent finance across the platforms SMBs already trust.

Proving the model: Building where businesses already work

Embedded finance partnerships between payroll, ERP, and AP platforms are still nascent, and the playbook for doing them well is still being written. BILL’s approach offers an early view of what that playbook might look like.

In the span of just a few months in late 2025, BILL announced embedded partnerships with three of the most consequential platforms in the SMB stack – two ERP platforms and a payroll provider – demonstrating how a single payments infrastructure layer can be woven into the platforms SMBs already rely on daily.

ERP platforms: BILL’s AP automation embeds directly into ERP platforms, giving customers a payment experience, capturing bills, paying vendors, and reconciling payments in real time, all without leaving their system of record.

Payroll and HR platforms: Integrating AP into payroll platforms alongside HR functions brings people management and vendor payments together for the first time — a combination that reflects the converging expectations of SMB operators.

Russell Kornman, Director of Product, Developer and Partner Platform at BILL, describes the approach as deliberately choosing depth over reach. “When a partner chooses BILL, they’re not just outsourcing payments plumbing,” he says. “They’re choosing to not rebuild something that already exists and is hard to get right. AP and payments aren’t just features – it’s rails, KYC/KYB, vendor onboarding, risk, and compliance. That’s years of work and ongoing cost.”

The beginning of a broader industry trend

These partnerships are still early-stage, proof points in what BILL views as a long-term infrastructure play. The embedded finance category is young, and the integrations being built today may look markedly different in three to five years. What matters now is who is developing the conceptual framework for how this should work.

BILL’s early moves suggest it is competing to define that framework. By embedding payments rails, compliance infrastructure, and an eight-million-business network into partner platforms — rather than building a standalone destination product — BILL is making a deliberate bet on where SMB financial operations are heading: away from point solutions and toward unified, intelligent workflows that work inside the tools people already use.

From system of record to system of execution

What makes the ERP integration model technically significant is how it reframes what an ERP is actually for. Traditional ERP implementations treat the system as a ledger, a place to record what happened. BILL’s embedded model pushes that further.

“Embedding BILL into an ERP turns AP from a multi-system process into a single flow,” says Kornman. “Users can select bills, pay them, and see status and reconciliation come back in near real time, all without leaving the ERP. That removes things where breaks occur for customers today: exports, file uploads, duplicate entry,” he added.

For cloud ERP customers, a complementary integration adds an AP layer alongside existing receivables capabilities.  Together, they create a complete pay-in and pay-out experience inside one platform. “BILL’s role is bringing a best-in-class AP engine and payments network into these systems  so customers get a stronger AP experience without the platform having to build and maintain it themselves,” Kornman said.

Converging people and payments

There is a convergence of workforce management and financial operations unfolding in the SMB space. For SMBs that have historically juggled HR, payroll, and vendor payments across separate systems, the direction of travel is toward a genuinely unified back office.

Kornman frames it as both a product opportunity and a strategic one. “Payroll, HR, and vendor payments are converging, and customers increasingly want that in one place. By embedding BILL inside a leading payroll platform, we become the financial operations layer within the HR tools SMBs already rely on.”

According to BILL’s research, 62% of SMBs cannot immediately view their current cash position across all accounts, and nearly 40% of businesses that haven’t yet automated their financial operations plan to do so within six months. Integrations like this meet that demand by delivering clarity, speed, and control inside a platform hundreds of thousands of SMBs already use daily.

The network effect at scale

Underlying all three partnerships is an asset that competitors would find difficult to replicate quickly: BILL’s network. With more than eight million businesses connected across its platform, BILL processes roughly 1% of U.S. GDP annually. When any partner embeds BILL, they gain instant access to a vendor network that reduces onboarding friction, accelerates electronic payments, and raises the floor on payment security.

“Customers can increasingly find and pay vendors already on the network, which reduces onboarding friction, cuts down on checks, and drives more secure electronic payments,” Kornman notes. “As more customers join the network, the experience only improves.”

This network advantage compounds over time, and it provides the foundation for BILL’s most ambitious move yet.

Agentic AI and the Fortune 5 million

In late October 2025, BILL launched BILL AI: A suite of AI agents specifically designed for what CEO René Lacerte calls the “Fortune 5 Million”: the small and midsize businesses that power the U.S. economy but have historically been underserved by enterprise-grade automation.

The initial agents are focused on eliminating the most painful manual workflows in SMB finance: BILL’s W-9 agent autonomously requests, collects, and pre-validates tax forms from vendors, eliminating over 80% of the manual steps in a process that over 90% of business leaders describe as the most painful part of tax season. 

Other agents like the reconciliation agent automatically codes card transactions so receipts reconcile themselves, with early rollouts showing a 533% increase in transactions coded entirely by AI. An agentic onboarding feature for Spend & Expense automatically creates virtual cards and permissions so new employees can begin spending compliantly from day one.

These agents are trained on more than $1 trillion in transactions and 1.3 billion documents – proprietary data that gives BILL’s AI a head start no synthetic dataset can replicate. And critically, they are woven directly into the embedded partner ecosystem. “Instead of building their own AI stack, partners will be able to offer capabilities like automated invoice capture and coding, anomaly detection, and approval recommendations,” says Kornman. “That raises the bar for what their platforms can deliver without adding complexity on their side.”

The embedded finance model is still early. The partnerships being built today are first-generation integrations, and the industry is still working out what “done” looks like. But BILL’s approach – leading with infrastructure, network effects, and proprietary AI, reflects a considered view of where SMB financial operations are heading. In a fragmented market, the company that builds the rails often ends up running the trains.