Corporate Cards Embrace Biometrics, Integrations And Value-Added Features

With commercial card adoption continuing to climb, service providers are exploring new ways to help businesses overcome adoption barriers and embrace new scenarios to use their corporate cards.

This week’s Commercial Card Innovation Tracker includes plans for biometrically secure business cards, new insight on corporate cards’ growing presence in goods and services tax (GST) payments and more.

Samsung, Mastercard Eye Biometrics For Corporate Cards

Samsung and Mastercard are teaming up on a biometric card product, with Samsung planning to integrate fingerprint scanning technology on the card to drive enhanced security at the point of purchase. But the solution won’t be available to consumers at first. Rather, the partners are targeting the corporate card space due to its high volume of international transactions linked to business travel. Samsung Card will begin the product’s rollout in South Korea later this year.

“We have big data expertise and have set the standard in domestic market for digital transformation and fraud detection system (FDS),” said Hanjoo Yoon, corporate vice president of the Strategy Planning Division at Samsung Card, in a statement. “Leveraging these experiences, we will deliver a powerful solution to enhance payment experiences in close partnership with Samsung Electronics and Mastercard.”

Partners Introduce Card Processing Within QuickBooks

Century Business Solutions and Riston Financial Service Group are collaborating on a new solution that could incentivize suppliers to accept card payments by reducing card processing friction. The collaboration will enable businesses to process card transactions from directly within QuickBooks. Century will add its EBizCharge gateway, which can already integrate with a variety of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. The technology aims to reduce the costs of processing card payments by streamlining line-item data connectivity to banks, while also enabling end users to access custom reports to categorize and identify charges. It’s a tool that may ease the burden of corporate card acceptance for B2B businesses using QuickBooks.

Sampath Bank Eyes Cash Management With Card Solution

Sampath Bank, based in Sri Lanka, announced it is looking to introduce the country’s first Visa business debit card. The financial institution (FI) is rolling out the Sampath Visa Business Debit card, which integrates directly with corporate bank accounts. Sampath is targeting enhanced cash management for its business customers, enabling them to migrate away from cash and load up debit cards for employees to use with greater expenditure control. The card supports custom monthly transaction limits, while transaction data across cards can be consolidated within an organization to track spending patterns.

“Moving away from cumbersome cash transactions, businesses can now provide staff members with individual debit cards to be used for company expenses,” explained Tharaka Ranwala, senior deputy general manager of Operations and group chief marketing officer of Sampath Bank.

PayMate Boosts Corporate Card Tax Payments

India-based PayMate released new data on its card processing activity, noting that it has hit the $130 million monthly mark for processing corporate GST payments via bank-issued Visa commercial cards. Further, PayMate predicted that transaction value to climb to $250 million every month for the fiscal year ending March 2022. The GST payment automation solution enables businesses to make bulk payments toward challans — official documents to facilitate a bank transfer — on India’s GST portal. PayMate automatically collects that challan data, pushes it through a digital approval process, and allows corporates to make that payment via commercial card.

In a statement, PayMate Founder and CEO Ajay Adiseshann said, “the exceptional capability of enabling businesses to use commercial cards for these payments has proved to be extremely fruitful as we are providing additional avenues to businesses for using their commercial credit cards on our platform.”