Visa Says CFOs See Digital Payments Solutions Through Working Capital Lens

Back in the darkest days of the pandemic, Visa struck a partnership with Conferma Pay to integrate the payment network’s virtual cards into the latter’s mobile app.

Tap and pay, and contactless payments, as COVID-19 ravaged the globe, were top of mind, a way to keep safe amid a public health crisis.

Virtual cards were, and still are, also a way to get spending power into the hands of employees across a decentralized, work-from-home workforce.

Jason Lalor, CEO at Conferma Pay, and Gloria Colgan, senior vice president and global head of product at Visa Commercial Solutions, told Karen Webster that a broadening and deepening of their strategic collaboration seeks to leverage digital offerings to help financial institutions (FIs) help their corporate clients improve everything from procurement to invoicing to spend management, creating a “Swiss Army knife” approach that ultimately improves cash flow.

Visa expanded its partnership with Conferma Pay Thursday (Aug. 10) to enhance its B2B payment offerings tied to Visa Commercial Pay. In tandem with the deeper engagement, the collaboration has been extended for four years.

“We’ve been hanging around together for a while,” Lalor observed wryly.

Thursday’s announcement expands the reach of Visa Commercial Pay’s mobile app, Visa Commercial Pay Travel and Visa Commercial Pay B2B more fully into Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

The joint efforts between Visa and Conferma integrate virtual cards with digital wallets, in turn giving chief financial officers the ability to control corporate spending, especially unplanned spending.

Within the travel vertical, for example, a virtual corporate card can be provisioned directly to a digital wallet on an employee’s mobile phone, managed by the company and enabling contactless digital payments.

For Visa, the pact illustrates a commitment to help corporates automate their payments practices while adding layers of security. For Conferma, the broadened rollout boosts the virtual payments provider’s global footprint.

As Colgan noted, “the demand for digital just keeps expanding,” especially in newer and emerging markets. The digitization of business payments has been rapidly following, and catching up to, the great digital shift that has marked consumer-led transactions.

“We have multiple tools in the toolkit, from an internal perspective, and as well as a partnership perspective, to expand acceptance on the commercial front,” Colgan said.

Corporates Prod Their FIs

Although the digitization of commercial payments might be seen as a long-tailed market, corporates, said Colgan have been pushing their FIs to help them find better ways to manage their back-office functions, especially payables.

The issuers, for their part, are exploring “new and different ways” to tap into working capital solutions that can include virtual cards, Colgan said.

With a nod toward developing those use cases, issuing partners gain instant access to the network of platforms already connected to Visa Commercial Pay.

For Conferma, said Lalor, “we’ve been central to connecting a travel ecosystem — and we connect issuers to 150 travel platforms that serve thousands of corporates … but the extension [with Visa] is that we’re one connection to enable commerce regardless of the ecosystem.”

Beyond the ongoing focus on the travel industry, there’s an identifiable roadmap to tackle procurement, which is top of mind for CFOs. Visa Commercial Pay’s rollout to several banks thus far includes connectivity to invoice management platforms through a single point of integration, reducing discrepancies and the need for manual intervention, freeing up time and boosting margins.

Automated requisition to payment workflows, observed Lalor, eventually lead to “enhanced supplier relationships … issuing banks have got to have the tools to serve these corporate clients … and that’s the Swiss Army knife analogy.”

The CFO and treasurers’ relentless focus on spend management is aided by the fact that the cards provisioned to employees’ digital Apple and Google wallets can include expense controls that adhere to corporate policy and head off unplanned expenses before they occur, Colgan said.

She explained that the automated integration into enterprise resource planning (ERP) eliminates touch points as virtual accounts are created, cards are issued and suppliers are paid.

“This takes a lot of costs out of the system,” Colgan told Webster.

Moving Beyond Travel

Looking out over the multiyear horizon of the expanded Visa-Conferma collaboration, Colgan contended that FIs and client teams have been focused on expanding virtual cards across a broader set of ecosystems. The flexibility of automation and digitization makes for a “no-brainer to think about how to expand usage.”

Added Lalor: “The opportunities for other areas of spend, outside of travel, well, they’re coming through loud and clear.”

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