It was only a matter of time. Banks have seen their payments margins squeezed amidst increasingly tough competition. So it was inevitable that one of the biggest upstart consumer payments platforms—Paypal—would make a move into the corporate payments landscape.

The payments processor that started life as a complementary service to eBay, and has since grabbed up a huge chunk of the online B2C payments market, has launched Paypal Business Payments.

Although companies of all sizes continue to maintain that they want to further electronify invoicing and payments, data from Phoenix Hecht shows that there was a big gap between the desire to do so and the reality for much of corporate America last year.

In fact, for the first time in quite a few years corporate check usage in the US increased, rather than decreasing.