Phil Beck

When Phil Beck joined Birchstreet  in the summer of 2024, he brought years of experience in banking and solving complex payment problems that are proving crucial to the innovative cloud-based payment provider. 

The company is a market leader in procure-to-pay software-as-a-service for the hospitality industry. Founded over two decades ago, its success is built on enabling hotels, restaurants and food service providers to automate their procurement processes, streamline payments and improve efficiency. 

Phil understands the inherent challenges of this process well. His journey in finance dates back to the mid-1990s, where he worked as a banker at PNC. Being embedded in the industry over subsequent years has seen him work for several companies solving sourcing and procure-to-pay challenges. 

“I kept gravitating toward payments as an area that had innate interest for me as a former banker and finance person,” he explains. This fascination eventually saw him pivot to Capital One's commercial bank, where he led the treasury function and gained invaluable knowledge as to how large financial institutions solve payment problems at scale. 

Joining Birchstreet gave Phil the opportunity to bring these best practices to an industry in need of modernisation. 

The hospitality sector presents unique challenges. Unlike other industries that have shifted towards digital-first payments, hospitality still relies heavily on manual processes. Cheque payments remain common, creating inefficiencies and increasing fraud risk, as well as leading to friction in supply chain processes that impacts businesses. 

Within this context, Phil’s objective is to embed payment capabilities directly into Birchstreet’s procurement platform. “This has been a chance to bring best practices from all sizes and scales into a vertical that has a definite need to modernise and digitise payments,” he says. 

The goal is that, rather than payments being treated as a separate function and the purview of finance departments, data and controls sit where they are most needed: with frontline operators dealing with suppliers every day. 

“We've brought it front and centre to the frontline operator, which changes the dynamic and the experience for that customer,” Phil highlights.

Birchstreet serves all the major hospitality brands alongside property management companies and group purchasing organisations. Its platform, developed through deep collaboration with customers and strategic partners, helps users, suppliers and organisations to optimise processes, transform operations and achieve savings. 

The company’s software enhances business processes by automating eProcurement, AP automation, inventory control, recipe management and analytics.

In order to effectively drive this transformation, Phil has spent much of his first year engaging closely with customers. “They have been great and very welcoming,” he says, “helping to educate me rapidly on the differences that are inherent in the industry.”

Learning hospitality from the inside has revealed operational complexities Phil never experienced as a business traveller. 

For example, one of the biggest challenges has been adapting broad, horizontal payment capabilities for hospitality's specific needs. Birchstreet’s unique value proposition lies in its ability to fine-tune platforms and solutions typically created to serve multiple industries into hospitality-specific solutions. 

The company focuses on three core areas: helping customers digitise payments and move away from cheques; embedding payments within the application layer that both centralised finance teams and decentralised operators use daily; and reducing fraud risk through digitisation.

The latter, says Phil, remains a key challenge with the industry facing growing fraud rates in areas including cheque washing and cheque fraud. Digital technologies provide an effective way of controlling and managing this risk