Melio, the New York-based accounts payable and receivable platform owned by Xero, launched an AI agent-powered B2B payment network on 17 June, enabling buyers to execute payments directly into supplier accounts receivable systems without requiring those suppliers to register on a new portal or payment network.
The company says the network has already processed more than 30,000 payments and recorded over $100million in annualised payment volume. Melio’s total platform handles more than $30billion in annual payment volume, and the firm says a growing share of that is becoming eligible for agent-driven execution.
How the agents work
Rather than routing payments through a closed network that both parties must join, Melio’s agents log into supplier billing and AR systems directly, identify the supplier’s preferred payment method by drawing on the platform’s historical AP data across tens of thousands of small businesses, execute the payment, and return structured remittance information automatically. The result is that the supplier receives funds in the format their system already expects, without any change to their workflow.
Aharon Levine, VP of payments strategy at Melio, framed the significance in structural terms. “For decades, scaling a B2B payment network meant either building a rail or signing suppliers up one at a time,” he said. “With agents, suppliers no longer have to join a network for the network to reach them. Buyers can execute payments with full auditability and less manual work, while suppliers receive faster payments with remittance data already attached.”
The friction of supplier onboarding has long been cited as the principal reason paper cheques remain stubbornly prevalent in US business payments. Melio’s release cites an estimate that roughly 40% of US B2B transactions still move by cheque, a figure that aligns with widely referenced Federal Reserve and NACHA data on business payment mix.
Market context and competitive read
The broader agentic AI payments space is attracting attention from several directions at once. Enterprise-focused platforms such as SAP Concur and Coupa have for years automated portions of the AP workflow, but their supplier networks still generally require bilateral onboarding. A wave of newer entrants including Zip, Tipalti and Ramp have compressed the manual-entry problem for mid-market buyers, but the unilateral-execution model Melio describes, where the paying agent acts without any counterparty setup, is a meaningfully different architectural claim.
Melio’s distribution position is a genuine asset here. Its partnerships with Capital One, Shopify and Fiserv give it embedded access to a large base of US small businesses that would not typically procure a standalone AP product. If agentic execution can be delivered through those channels at negligible incremental cost to the end user, the addressable population widens considerably beyond Melio’s existing nearly 100,000 direct business customers.
The regulatory context is also worth watching. Agentic systems that authenticate into third-party financial platforms on behalf of users sit in a grey area under existing US open-banking frameworks. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Section 1033 rulemaking, finalised in late 2024, established data-access rights for consumer accounts but does not yet cover business accounts comprehensively. Melio’s agents operate in the business payments space rather than retail, but as agentic credential use scales, regulators and financial institutions will likely scrutinise liability allocation when an automated agent initiates a misdirected or fraudulent payment.
Melio did not disclose the accuracy rate of supplier payment-method identification, the error or failure rate on agent-executed transactions, or the terms under which liability sits if an agent executes a payment incorrectly. These will be material questions for accounting firms and CFOs evaluating the product.
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