HSBC Teams With Extend to Offer Virtual Cards

Extend has teamed with banking giant HSBC to offer customers virtual cards.

It’s the second partnership for the virtual card and spend management platform Extend in the last week, arriving in anticipation of a boom in the virtual card industry, with transactions projected to reach the multi-trillion-dollar level in the years ahead.

“Virtual card capabilities represent a world of opportunity for our commercial card clients,” Faisal Jafri, who heads HSBC’s commercial cards operations for the Americas, said in a Wednesday (Dec. 14) news release.

“They want digital solutions for daily challenges, including vendor payments and expense reconciliation. Partnering with Extend allows us to deliver important innovations to our clients, and we look forward to rolling out these capabilities to our clients,” he added.

According to the news release, the partnership will let joint Extend/HSBC customers use their HSBC business cards to simplify essential processes and allow “anyone, anywhere to make business payments.”

The release said Extend’s digital solutions are available to now HSBC commercial card customers in the U.S., with further tools expected to debut next year.

Last week, Extend formed a partnership with BMO to help that bank’s customers create, send and manage Mastercard-powered virtual cards from their corporate card program using Extend’s mobile and desktop apps.

As PYMNTS has written recently, virtual cards are fast becoming the go-to payment method in a number of markets around the globe as companies go digital. This is due to their ability to help prevent overspending and stop the mismanagement of funds.

The worldwide value of virtual card transactions is expected to reach $6.8 trillion in 2026, compared to $1.9 trillion last year, an indicator of the payment method’s growing value for corporations in the business-to-business (B2B) payment world.

Speaking to PYMNTS recently, Gökhan Nazenin, European vice president of sales for banking and payments at FIS, said a lot of that business will happen in the U.S., as companies begin to digitize workflows and automate paper-based processes.

These cards also offer a secure way for buyers to pay suppliers instantly while gaining time to pay outstanding credit card balances, Nazenin said. He added that virtual cards also give businesses a means to earn added income with interchange revenue.

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