The World Elite Business Mastercard, announced Wednesday (July 22), is designed to sync with Intuit’s QuickBooks platform to help businesses manage spending, access credit and get a handle on their financial health from a single place.
“We know businesses don’t have a one-size-fits-all need for capital, which is why we’re building a range of capital solutions on the Intuit platform,” David Hahn, executive vice president and general manager of Intuit’s services group, said in a news release. “The Intuit Business Credit Card introduces a smarter way to power business growth with critical controls and value on every dollar spent. This is an important part of Intuit’s broader commitment to building the capital solutions small businesses need to grow with confidence.”
The release points to in-house findings from Intuit showing that businesses that use financing are almost twice as likely to be “in an active growth phase” than businesses who rely on personal funds.
“Yet many businesses still lack timely access to capital and real-time visibility into their financial health, relying on disconnected tools and manual processes to manage spending, accounting, and financing,” the release said.
Intuit argues its new card addresses this by combining spending, credit, and financial data, allowing for “smarter cash flow control, confident spending, and growth opportunities.”
Research by PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard has found that a sizable number of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) don’t use a business credit card, with 30% saying they use personal cards to cover work-related expenses.
“With small businesses alone numbering 36 million in the United States and driving 43.5% of U.S. GDP, it all adds up to a lot of missed opportunity for card issuers,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.
More recently, PYMNTS spoke with Ginger Siegel, North America small and medium business lead at Mastercard, about some of the working capital burdens facing SMBs.
“The biggest challenge that small businesses face is really around cash flow uncertainty and everything that cascades from it,” Siegel said in an interview earlier this week, adding that lag times require owners to tap into personal reserves or credit lines.
Siegel went on to say that many businesses also lose purchasing opportunities while waiting for funds to settle, a burden compounded by administrative work that falls to owners who often oversee finance, operations and customer service on their own.
“The card is becoming more than a payment vehicle, and in fact is becoming a salve against those pain points,” PYMNTS wrote.
