Barclaycard: Why It’s Time To Rethink Everyday B2B Spend

Consumers are accustomed to using digital payment methods to make retail purchases. They can easily pay using digital wallets, cards-on-file or a wide variety of digital payment options online or in store, and transactions are expected to be fast, seamless and simple.

This is a far different experience for everyday business purchases. When individuals pay for work purchases using legacy paper methods, they know they need to pay now, and fill out their expense reports later. Then, if they are able to collect and save their paper receipts, they can eventually get reimbursed for expenses.

This manual system has been a source of frustration for both workers and their employers for years, but the pandemic has exacerbated the systems’ deeper flaws and served as a catalyst for a wave of spend management innovation.

In the inaugural edition of the “B2B Workforce Spend Playbook: A Guide To Modernizing Everyday Spend,” in collaboration with Conferma Pay, PYMNTS examines how the long-term transition to a remote workforce is affecting individuals’ ability to pay for the goods they need to work, eat, sleep, exercise and perform all their normal activities from home. The Playbook provides a big-picture window into the current state of the B2B workforce spend ecosystem and draws a roadmap for how businesses and card issuers can work to provide the payments solutions needed to survive and thrive in this new ecosystem.

Around The Everyday Workforce Spending World

Consumers’ fear of becoming infected with COVID-19 has sent interest in contactless payment options surging. In fact, 61 percent of consumers in the United States now say that they believe having contactless capabilities is at least “somewhat” of a priority when choosing debit and credit cards, and 29 percent say that they prefer contactless over all other payment methods.

Virtual cards are emerging as one of many digital payments solutions gaining traction in this digital-first ecosystem, with studies suggesting that the global virtual card market could triple in size by 2025. This growth is not limited to the business-to-consumer (B2C) market, either. B2B virtual spend is expected to account for 80 percent of this growth as the consumerization of everyday spend encourages businesses to provide their employees with the same digital payment methods to which they have grown accustomed in their everyday lives.

Providing these digital spending solutions employees need is only half the uphill battle businesses are facing to adjust their operations to the new digital-first ecosystem, however. Both companies and the individuals who make them run are facing widespread cash flow challenges, forcing them to limit their spending. Many companies, including Visa in a collaboration with Conferma Pay, are thus adopting digital spending control systems to gain more insight into their employees’ everyday spending and more control over their spending limits.

For more on these stories and other recent headlines on everyday spending, download this month’s Playbook.

Barclaycard On Everyday Spend Management And The Digital Shift

Many office workers never expected to be working remotely for so long – but it is now six months into the pandemic, and there is no sign that they will be going back to the office anytime soon.

In this month’s Feature Story, Maria Parpou, chief product officer at Barclaycard, spoke to PYMNTS on how the transition to a remote-first workforce is changing the way the corporate world thinks about everyday business spend.

Deep Dive: Fixing Corporate America’s Everyday Spending Problem

Legacy accounts receivable (AR) methods have come under increased scrutiny during the pandemic as they have become more difficult to carry out from home. For many companies and their increasingly remote workforce, running a paper-based AR department is no longer an option — and the financial pressure to scrimp and save is creating a need for more transparency and control in employees’ everyday spending.

This month’s Deep Dive explores the myriad innovations businesses are using to bring their everyday spend systems into the digital-first ecosystem.

About The Playbook

The “B2B Workforce Spend Playbook: A Guide To Modernizing Businesses’ Everday Spend,” a PYMNTS and Conferma Pay collaboration, explores the ways in which the demand for business spend management tools are arising amid the transition to a remote workforce.