BILL Takes Lead as SMB Financial Backbone

Embedded finance serves as the essential infrastructure layer for small and midsize businesses, with BILL positioning itself as the primary backbone for SMB financial operations. Most small and midsize businesses currently operate 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 spent the past year making a systematic argument that this tangled state does not have to be the case. Through a rapid series of embedded partnerships and a suite of AI Agents, the San Jose-based fintech positioned itself as the infrastructure layer that powers intelligent finance across the platforms SMBs already trust.

Embedded finance partnerships between payroll, ERP, and AP platforms remain 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, the company 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 businesses 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.

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Russell Kornman, Director of Product, Developer and Partner Platform at BILL, described the approach as deliberately choosing depth over reach. “When a partner chooses BILL, they’re not just outsourcing payments plumbing,” he said. “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.”

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.

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,” said 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.

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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.

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 noted. “As more customers join the network, the experience only improves.”

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.

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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 code 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.”