Upflow, a French startup we’ve been covering for a while, originally focused on managing unpaid invoices. The company is now announcing a change in strategy to become a B2B payments platform with its own payment gateway to complement its accounts receivable automation solution.

Like many Software-as-a-Service products, Upflow started by creating a central hub specifically designed for one job in particular: CFOs. From Upflow dashboards, CFOs and finance teams could view all of their company’s invoices, track payments, communicate with team members, and send reminders to customers.

It integrates seamlessly with other financial tools and services to automatically import data from these third-party services. And a tool like Upflow can be especially important as many tech companies struggle to raise their next round of funding and want to improve their cash balance.

But this was only the first step in a larger roadmap.

“Fundamentally, my view has always been that the real problem is payment methods,” Alexandre Louisy, co-founder and CEO of Upflow (pictured above), told TechCrunch. “Today, when you pay in a store, you pay with your phone. When you pay for your Spotify subscription or your Amazon subscription, you don’t even think about how you pay.

“But when you look at B2B payments, the way you pay today hasn’t changed in the last 50 years. And for us, this is the reason why people face late payments. What I really want to fight is the idea that late payments are linked to bad payers.”

According to him, in the United States, about 90% of B2B payments are made offline. These are still mostly paper checks. In Europe, it’s a different story as businesses have adopted bank transfers. But the transfers “are completely unstructured and require manual reconciliation,” Louisy said.

Upflow sells its accounts receivable automation software tool to mid-sized businesses with revenue between $10 million and $500 million per year. The company’s largest customer generates about $1 billion in annual revenue.

“But when you ask (financial directors): ‘What is your strategy for implementing direct debit on part of your customer base?’ They don’t have a solution,” Louisy said.

Upflow helps you put in place incentive strategies so that part of your customer base turns to online payments, such as card payments or direct debits. The idea is not that all your clients will pay overnight with a business card. But Upflow can help you change the payment method for about 20 or 30% of your customer base.

Just as CRMs help you manage your sales processes with customers, Upflow is now a financial relationship management (FRM) solution. This is an interesting strategy because it shows how a startup like Upflow plans to diversify its revenue sources.

“With our model change, we’re moving from a model where we’re 100% SaaS revenue based to a hybrid model where we have SaaS revenue and payment revenue because we have our own payment gateway that we have set up with Stripe,” says Louisy.

Payment is the second brick in the Upflow product suite. Next, the company plans to integrate financing options with “buy now, pay later” B2B payment methods on the supplier side and take into account a company’s outstanding invoices.

“We are evaluating solutions…that provide integrated financing,” Louisy said. “Risk assessment is not our core business. On the other hand, what is interesting is that we can provide them with useful data for credit scoring that they do not necessarily have when they simply connect to the account of one of our users.