Two announcements in the corporate cards space have been released this week. Firstly, Visa and Conferma Pay have announced a strategic partnership to launch Visa Commercial Pay, a suite of B2B payment solutions that are designed to help improve cash flow for businesses and eliminate manual processes.

Virtual commercial cards have never been more necessary than today, the two firms say. Remote workers are turning to personal cards to pay for corporate expenses, buyers and suppliers need more efficient ways to pay and get paid, and businesses need immediate visibility into their company spend to improve cash flow and mitigate risk efficiently. Visa Commercial Pay provides card programme management capabilities, including on-demand virtual card issuance to employees’ mobile devices via an app, created by Conferma Pay and Visa, for Visa’s commercial clients. The solution also aims to simplify money movement between buyers and suppliers, and features enhanced data, automated payment processing and expense reconciliation.

With virtual commercial cards at its core, Visa Commercial Pay features the following three B2B payment offerings for financial institutions and their corporate customers:

Visa Commercial Pay Mobile

A Visa-branded app, developed by Conferma Pay and Visa for Visa’s commercial clients, will host digitally-issued Visa virtual commercial cards on employee and contractors’ mobile devices. The app brings businesses enhanced tools and features, enabling users to manage and track spend, and lessen the dependency on issuing and mailing physical cards. It gives employees the convenience of using on-demand, virtual cards to facilitate their business purchases, whether online purchases or in-store tap to pay capabilities through seamless integration into mobile wallets.

Visa Commercial Pay Travel

A solution that enables businesses to centrally manage their business travel spend, such as air and hotel. The solution integrates into business travel reservation processes and delivers enhanced data, full spend visibility and automated expense reconciliation. Employees and contractors who also use the Visa Commercial Pay Mobile app are able to view their reservations and total spend within the app.

Visa Commercial Pay B2B

A platform that combines the capabilities of Visa and Conferma Pay, to give buyers and suppliers more options to pay and get paid. It provides a range of features to help companies better manage cash flow and capture enhanced data for reconciliation and reporting capabilities. Companies can select the optimal solution for them, either a single comprehensive programme management platform or an integrated solution into third party procurement platforms.

“The launch of Visa Commercial Pay in partnership with Conferma Pay allows us to accelerate B2B money movement away from slow, outdated methods to fast, data-rich, secure digital payments and give businesses better control over their finances," commented Kevin Phalen, global head of Visa Business Solutions.

“With a new economic environment, the controls to decentralise payments have to be put in place and with employees working from home, the ability to monitor, reconcile and approve spend becomes far more difficult,” added Simon Barker, CEO at Conferma Pay. “With the Visa Commercial Pay initiative, we are excited to partner with Visa and help businesses gain greater visibility and control over B2B spend whilst drastically improving the payment experience for buyers, suppliers, company contractors and employees.”

Visa says that its commercial clients can use the suite of solutions across multiple commercial-spend use cases, without any additional development or operational complexity that often comes with launching new capabilities. Financial institutions can use Visa’s new set of flexible virtual card capabilities in their entirety or a la carte, in order to quickly meet their clients’ needs.

Simplifying expense management

In other commercial card news this week, BBVA has developed Global Commercial Cards, a solution designed to allow companies to have greater control of employees’ use of commercial cards simplifying the processes of expense submission and approval.

The solution, globally developed and available in eight countries, is aimed for corporate clients to help simplify and optimise corporate expenses paid using BBVA commercial cards.

“With Global Commercial Cards, BBVA has managed to bridge the gap between two worlds: commercial cards and expense management tools," claims Sergio Ortega, head of global commercial cards solution at BBVA Enterprise Clients. "To achieve it, it has used technology and data enabling companies to manage their employees’ expenses in a much more agile and simple way, while keeping control and end to end traceability throughout the whole process.”

The solution tailors to the needs of all types of companies, regardless of their size - whether global, regional or local - and expedites the workload of all stakeholders involved in the expense management process, from financial to human resources through purchasing and business trips areas providing quick and easy access to all the relevant information.

The solution is in charge of centralising all the expenses and automatically sending them to the expense management tool or enterprise resource planning system (ERP) chosen by the company. Global Commercial Cards is integrated with expense management tools such as SAP Concur, Captio by Emburse, Expensify, Certify by Emburse or Visa IntelliLink Spend Management, with which the activation of the service is almost immediate.

The solution is available for commercial cards issued in Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Uruguay; and all of them can be used worldwide.

Paradigm shift

“In the current context, strongly influenced by the coronavirus crisis, the way of managing corporate expenses is evolving and there is an increasing demand for digital processes which enable homogeneous global corporate expenses management," explains Ortega. "The launch of Global Commercial Cards allows BBVA to meet these needs and take a further step in its commitment to offering innovative solutions which put technology at the service of companies.”

With the solution, the usage of BBVA commercial cards will not only benefit employees, who will have a secure and universally accepted payment solution which circumvents the use of cash or their consumer card. It will also allow companies to be able to more efficiently control how much, when and on what the employee spends their money, making the management of these payments much easier - traditionally associated with tedious and poorly optimised processes.