Consumers have flocked to new payment methods in recent years. But companies have been slow to move from paper checks to electronic payment methods, particularly for business-to-business transactions, despite the benefits that e-payments can provide.

And a survey conducted earlier this year by the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) suggests even that slow pace of adoption of electronic payments for B2B transactions may be stalling.

At the 412 companies the AFP surveyed, an average of 51% of payments were still being made with checks. That's basically unchanged from the 50% of payments made by check in the AFP's last survey, in 2013, and it represents an interruption in the steady adoption of electronic payments shown in a series of previous AFP surveys, as checks went from 81% of payments in 2004 to 74% in 2007, to 67% in 2010 and 50% in 2013.