Visa Debuts Virtual Card Solution With Lloyds Bank

Visa has teamed with Lloyds Bank to launch a virtual card solution for businesses.

“Available now to Lloyds Bank customers, Visa Commercial Pay addresses businesses’ payments and purchasing administration challenges, such as controlling spend, simplifying processes, reconciling invoices, and reporting on expenditure,” the company said in a news release Wednesday (Sept. 27). 

According to the release, the new solution allows for efficient online purchasing by instantly issuing virtual cards, which employees can request to make work-related purchases such as subscription payments or business travel. 

“The virtual cards — which can be single or multi-use — adopt existing approval workflows and include the business’s own unique reference fields,” the release said.

“They can be issued individually or by batch and offer real-time control, allowing business administrators and managers to closely manage spending within their teams,” the release added. 

The partnership is happening at a time when many industry observers say virtual cards are set to change the business-to-business (B2B) commercial payments landscape.

“There’s a lot of growth in this area, and it comes down to simplification and flexibility for companies,” Dan Hanks, vice president of global product development at i2c, told PYMNTS in a July interview.

“Virtual cards are a great tool for getting all that friction out of the B2B process; vendors can process them immediately with no wait,” Hanks said. 

Hanks added that on the payor’s side, virtual cards give them real-time insight into expense tracking, organized by vendor and category.

Virtual cards are also becoming a crucial tool in effective working capital management, Alan Koenigsberg, senior vice president and global head of large, middle market, treasury and working capital solutions at Visa, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster recently.

“The movement to card is moving faster because it’s a matter of straight-through processing,” he said. “The payments are easier to reconcile, and the whole process is more holistic.”

“The world’s changing very quickly,” he added. The days of low interest rates are decidedly over, offering a chance to refocus on what growth corporations need in the years ahead. “We need to adapt, and we need to adapt quickly.”

Koenigsberg spoke with Webster following the release of Visa’s 2023 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index, which was created in collaboration with PYMNTS Intelligence.

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