Here is a conversation I have had more times than I can count, from both sides of the table. AP has a tool they want their suppliers' receivables teams to log into. The receivables team has a tool they want AP to log into instead. Neither one talks to the other, and neither side is particularly interested in giving up their own system for someone else's.

Multiply that across a supplier base of any real size, and you get the actual problem underneath most failed portal rollouts. It is not that suppliers refuse to adopt new technology. It is that the technology they are being asked to adopt does not solve enough of their actual problem to be worth the trip.

Think about what a supplier's receivables team is really trying to answer on any given day. When am I getting paid. Can I take an early payment discount, and what does that actually cost me. Why is this invoice showing as disputed, and what do I need to fix. If your portal only answers one of those questions, you have not removed their workload, you have just added a new place for them to check before they still pick up the phone or send the email they were always going to send anyway.

I have watched this play out directly during onboarding too, and it is its own kind of frustrating. A supplier goes through one process to get set up, submitting banking details, a W9, all the basic information. Then they discover there is a completely separate system to check invoice status. And another one entirely for early payment options like dynamic discounting. By the third login they cannot remember, you have lost them. Not because they do not want to engage, but because you have made engaging more work than it is worth.

This is the piece that gets missed when people talk about supplier adoption as a willingness problem. It is rarely about willingness. It is about value. If logging into your platform resolves the actual question a supplier has, in one place, without still needing to send a follow up email, they will use it. If it gives them a partial answer and sends them looking elsewhere for the rest, they will treat it exactly like the extra step it actually is.

The standard I would hold any platform to, whether you are the one buying it or the one building it, is simple. Can a supplier come to one place and get a real answer to the questions that actually drive their behavior: when they are getting paid, what their options are if they want that payment sooner, and what is actually wrong if something is held up. If the honest answer is they still need to email you after checking your portal, you have not built a tool that reduces friction. You have built one more place for friction to collect.