It’s the golden rule of business payments, too.
But unlike the consumer payments space where mobile wallets, tap-to-pay and one-click checkouts have reshaped expectations, B2B payments remain stubbornly complex. While consumer payments have sprinted into frictionless digital territory, the B2B side has remained stuck in a world of file uploads, siloed data and compliance bottlenecks.
“Our corporate clients run a plethora of technology across their organizations,” Marc Pettican, global head of corporate solutions at Mastercard, told PYMNTS. “They may be using ERP solutions, procure-to-pay solutions, integrated software vendors, and that’s quite different across verticals.”
Each layer in the tech stack is essential; yet few often speak the same language. That’s why, as CFOs weigh increasing their technology spend, the spotlight is falling on payment innovation as a lever for both efficiency and control.
To meet this need, Mastercard on Wednesday (Oct. 15) announced two developments aimed squarely at that intersection: Commercial Connect API and Clearing Controls for virtual cards. It’s a move designed not just to modernize the plumbing of corporate finance, but to bring a more consumer-like experience to the B2B world.
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“This is effectively enabling our customers to have a simple integration into our ecosystem, one front door to Mastercard capabilities through a scalable connection,” Pettican said.
Solving for the B2B Integration Dilemma
The fragmentation of corporate payments has become a strategic liability. Manual reconciliation, inconsistent reporting, and limited visibility across cash flows can constrain not only finance departments but also broader business agility.
But most CFOs don’t want another system; they want their existing systems to work better.
Pettican said embedded finance is the way out, noting the Commercial Connect API launch underscores Mastercard’s shift from being a payment network to becoming a platform orchestrator for B2B payments, focusing on modularity, APIs and embedded finance to reduce complexity for enterprise customers.
“We’re embedding our payment capabilities as an ingredient into the overarching tech stack that our customers are running,” he said. “Effectively, what we’re trying to do is give businesses access to working capital and process efficiencies, and allow them to concentrate on running their business.”
“The feedback we had from our customers is, ‘How can we continue to make integrations into the ecosystem faster and simpler for us?’ This is a major step,” Pettican said of Commercial Connect API.
Strengthening Trust Through Control with Virtual Cards
Virtual cards are drawing renewed attention as CFOs rethink working capital and supplier management. Their appeal lies in flexibility and control: dynamic card numbers, transaction-level data and embedded policy compliance.
But until recently, those benefits were offset by adoption complexity. If the Commercial Connect API addresses the how of integration, Mastercard’s second announcement focuses on how well. The company’s new Clearing Controls enhancement for virtual cards aims to extend transaction security throughout the entire payment lifecycle.
Traditionally, transaction controls such as spend limits or merchant category restrictions applied only at the authorization stage. But in B2B contexts, where transactions can be batched, delayed or reconciled over time, risk doesn’t end once a charge is approved.
“What our customers want is those controls to be through the entire lifecycle of the transaction,” Pettican said. “At the moment, controls are typically done at the authorization level. But we want to make sure our issuers can apply those controls right the way through, even to the point when you’re settling the transaction.”
In practice, Clearing Controls empower issuers to block or flag anomalies even after authorization but before settlement, a safeguard that may prove particularly valuable in high-volume or multi-party payment chains.
“This enables blocking any non-conforming transactions in that clearing stage,” Pettican said. “The feedback we’re getting from our customers is very positive.”
The Long Tail of Consumerization
Perhaps the most transformative shift underlying Mastercard’s recent moves is cultural rather than technological. The company’s innovations are guided by a principle increasingly echoed across enterprise finance: the consumerization of B2B payments.
Today’s business leaders and finance teams are coming to expect the same intuitive interfaces, real-time data and embedded functionality that define their personal financial lives.
Mastercard’s roadmap reflects this behavioral evolution. By unifying its ecosystem through APIs and embedding controls directly into workflows, it is making payments disappear into the background while transforming them from discrete events into seamless components of daily operations. This invisibility is not about abstraction; it’s about fluidity. When payments are effortless, finance teams can focus on strategy rather than process.
“There are still a lot of checks in many [B2B] systems,” Pettican said. “For us, it’s about helping customers re-engineer their accounts payable and receivable processes to drive out paper and inefficiencies, do that in an economical way, and allow them to concentrate on growing their businesses.”
He added, “It’s about making the payment piece a little more invisible.”
Marc Pettican leads the global corporate solutions business for the Commercial & New Payment Flows team at Mastercard, where he’s also a member of the company’s Management Committee and the CNPF Leadership Team.
