Business-to-business payments are a strange corner of finance. The global volume is staggering, roughly $186 trillion in 2025. The technology behind it? Often embarrassing. Manual invoicing, 30-day payment terms negotiated by email, credit checks that take days. Consumer payments got Klarna and Stripe years ago. B2B got left behind.

Now DNB, Norway's largest bank, and Two, an Oslo-based fintech, are trying to change that. Their new partnership launches an AI-powered buy now, pay later solution for B2B commerce across the Nordics. The pitch: real-time credit assessment, instant invoice payments, and same-day settlement for merchants.

It sounds incremental until you realize that up to 80% of SME invoices are still processed manually. That's not a technology gap. That's a technology canyon.

Per Kristian Naess Fladset, Group Executive Vice President at DNB, put it plainly: the B2B payments space is ripe for transformation. That's the kind of thing executives say, but in this case the data backs it up. B2B e-commerce alone was valued at $19.3 trillion in 2024 and is expected to more than double to $47.5 trillion by 2030.

Two's CEO Andreas Mjelde was more direct: the rails that global B2B commerce runs on are overdue for a rebuild. He's not wrong. While consumer BNPL exploded over the past five years, the business equivalent has been slow to emerge. Credit decisions still require human review. Onboarding new business customers takes days, sometimes weeks.

The core of the partnership sits in Two's real-time credit assessment technology. When a business buyer checks out on a merchant's webshop or marketplace, Two's AI runs a credit decision instantly. No paperwork. No waiting. The buyer gets invoice terms from 30 to 90 days. The merchant gets paid the same day. Both DNB and Two absorb the credit risk.

That last point matters more than it looks. Absorbing credit risk means the merchant doesn't carry exposure on their balance sheet. For smaller businesses especially, that's transformative. Offering trade credit to buyers has always been a competitive advantage, but it's one that only well-capitalized companies could afford. This partnership democratizes it.

DNB brings distribution and banking infrastructure. Two brings the technology layer. It's a clean split that plays to each side's strengths, and it avoids the common fintech trap of trying to be both the technology platform and the balance sheet provider simultaneously.

There's a reason this partnership starts in the Nordics. The region has the highest digital payment adoption rates in the world. Norwegian consumers abandoned cash years ago. Swedish businesses are highly digitized. If B2B BNPL is going to work anywhere, it should work here first.

But Nordic success doesn't guarantee global relevance. B2B payment practices vary dramatically across markets. German businesses run on direct debit. French companies negotiate payment terms as a matter of national culture. Expanding beyond the Nordics will require adapting to fundamentally different commercial norms, not just translating a product.

Two isn't new to this space. The company previously partnered with Elkjop (the Nordic electronics chain) and Signicat for business buyer verification. The DNB partnership represents a significant step up in ambition and distribution reach.

For DNB, this is part of a broader strategy to stay relevant as fintech companies increasingly chip away at traditional banking services. Partnering with Two rather than building in-house is a pragmatic choice. Banks that try to build fintech products internally often end up with expensive projects that ship late and underwhelm. Co-owning the product with a startup that moves faster is the smarter play.

Consumer BNPL attracted regulatory scrutiny precisely because it made it too easy for individuals to accumulate debt. The B2B version faces a different risk profile. Business buyers have existing credit needs that are currently met by slower, more expensive instruments. Replacing manual invoice processing with automated credit assessment is efficiency, not encouragement to overspend.

Still, the model depends on AI credit decisions being accurate. If Two's algorithms misjudge default risk at scale, the losses fall on DNB and Two's balance sheets. At small volumes, that's manageable. At the scale they're targeting, accuracy isn't just a feature. It's the entire business model.

For now, the partnership is a strong signal that Norway's banking establishment sees B2B payments as the next frontier. And they'd rather ride with a fintech than watch one disrupt them.