Mastercard Offers Small Businesses Insights From Virtual CFO

Mastercard has introduced an agentic AI offering designed to help small businesses.

The company’s Virtual C-Suite, announced Tuesday (March 10), is a collection of artificial intelligence (AI) agents that serve as a “digital executive” to help with things like finance, security and marketing.

“Small businesses are the cornerstones of communities, but it’s easy for owners to lose sight of the passions that inspired them when they’re buried in spreadsheets and stretched across multiple roles,” Mark Barnett, global head of small and medium enterprises at Mastercard, said in a news release.

“We hear these pressures from entrepreneurs every day. With Virtual C-Suite, we are bringing the innovative technology, quality data at scale, and strategic expertise usually available to large enterprises to small business owners.

The release notes that while small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) make up 90% of businesses and more than half of worldwide employment, these enterprises face increasing and operational complexity, often depending on lean teams or lacking dedicated subject matter experts to handle the various aspects of running a business.

To that end, Mastercard says the Virtual C-Suite integrates agentic AI-powered intelligence with the accounting systems, business software and banking applications that small businesses already use. Once embedded, it can analyze business performance, identify opportunities and risks, and recommend steps to optimize growth.

The first module being rolled out is the Virtual CFO capability, offered through financial institutions, accounting platforms and software providers.

PYMNTS spoke with Mastercard’s Barnett last month about the need for SMBs to embrace better technological practices.

“For too long,” many of these businesses have operated “on the edges of the digital economy,” held back by cash, checks and fragmented back-office systems that eat up time and keep them from capturing opportunities, Barnett said.

The challenge facing these businesses isn’t adopting the next tool, but weaving together the systems, networks and communities that open the doors to a faster, more automated economy.

“SMBs need to be connected in the very broadest of terms,” he said.

Barnett also touched on the importance of cybersecurity as a key determinant of business survival, pointing to data from his company showing that 46% of small businesses have experienced a cyberattack. Of that number, nearly 20% went out of business within a year.

“Even if you take that with a pinch of salt, it’s a horrifying number,” he said.