B2B ecommerce is growing faster than ever, but the financial infrastructure behind it hasn’t kept pace. Credit decisions still take days, payments move through legacy rails, and finance teams spend hours stitching data across disconnected systems. These workflows were built for a slower, offline world, not for the speed and scale that today’s digital market demands.
At Balance, we’ve already automated the foundation of B2B commerce with AI-powered underwriting, autonomous collections, and smart reconciliation that remove friction from the invoice-to-cash cycle.
Now, we’re taking the next step by announcing a beta release that connects Balance’s APIs to large language models through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). With MCP support, AI agents can now communicate natively with Balance’s APIs, unlocking a new layer of intelligence. Merchants can ask questions, uncover insights, and take action in real time, all directly from their preferred AI chat interface, without ever leaving the conversation.
Our vision is simple: a world where B2B commerce moves at the pace of business itself, creating a more connected, efficient supply chain. When payments, credit, and receivables operate autonomously and in sync, every part of the supply chain benefits: businesses trade faster, suppliers are paid sooner, and efficiency flows through the entire supply chain, right down to the consumer.
What MCP Is and Why It Matters?
MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in late 2024, that enables AI systems to safely interact with external tools, databases, and workflows. Think of it as a universal adapter that lets AI agents “plug into” business systems, much like USB standardized how devices connect to computers.
What Is the Balance MCP Server?
The Balance MCP Server allows large language models (LLMs) and AI agents to directly interact with Balance’s APIs, enabling secure, conversational access to payments, credit, and accounts receivable data.
With the Balance MCP Server, merchants using AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT can link them directly to their Balance account, creating a real-time, intelligent layer over existing workflows. Once connected, merchants can query live data, generate insights, and even take actions through conversational commands all without leaving their chat interface.
How Merchants Can Use Balance’s MCP Server?
Here are a few examples of the use cases our new MCP server enables:
#1 Uncover Insights Across Your Entire Customer Portfolio
With the Balance MCP Server, sales and finance teams can instantly surface trends and opportunities hidden in their customer data.
Simply ask questions like:
- “Show me buyers approved for net terms who haven’t ordered in 60 days.”
- “Show me top products purchased by buyers with Net 30 terms”
- “Which buyers are consistently reaching their credit limits?”
- “Which accounts have unpaid invoices?”
In seconds, you’ll see clear, data-backed answers, no spreadsheets or BI tools required. These insights help identify dormant accounts, reveal purchasing behavior across customer segments, and highlight where engagement or outreach could drive the next sale.
#2 Maximize Buyer Growth with Actionable Insights
Your AI agent can drill down into specific buyer accounts, pulling together credit activity, payment patterns, order history, and engagement data to create a complete picture of their relationship with your business. Whether it’s reviewing recent payment behavior before a meeting, or spotting opportunities for reorders, teams can now understand every customer’s activity in context and act on it instantly.
Ask questions such as:
- “What’s Buyer X’s payment history over the last three months?”
- “How often does Buyer X reach their credit limit?”
- “Has Buyer X’s order volume increased or declined this quarter?”
These insights help sales teams anticipate needs, personalize conversations, and strengthen every buyer relationship, turning raw data into smarter, faster decisions.
#3 Manage daily tasks from within your chat interface:
Beyond insights, merchants can now take action directly from their AI interface. While most Balance workflows already run autonomously, there are moments when teams need to step in to handle exceptions, customize experiences for specific buyers, or move faster on specific requests. With the Balance MCP Server, those actions can now happen conversationally, right inside your AI chat interface.
Through natural language, merchants can trigger actions without logging into the dashboard such as:
- Onboard new buyers and generate qualification links for instant terms.
- Create or send invoices manually for off-platform or one-time orders.
- Refresh a buyer’s credit data before a large purchase or account review.
- Pause or resume collections for a specific account when coordinating with sales.
- Check the payment status or due date for a key buyer before a meeting.
Building What’s Next for Agentic B2B Commerce
The beta release of our MCP server is another milestone on our journey to modernize how B2B commerce operates.
We’re building infrastructure that moves at the speed of business, where data flows seamlessly, decisions happen in real time, and growth doesn’t wait for manual intervention. Through Agentic B2B Commerce, we’re bringing intelligence and autonomy to the foundation of B2B transactions creating tools that power better, faster commerce at scale.
The MCP server is now in closed beta. Let us know here if you’d like to be notified when it becomes generally available.
