Companies Find Success With Integrated Approach to Issuing Payment Cards

You know the drill.

Getting a debit card — or any payment card, really — can be a paperwork-heavy process, involving phone calls and waiting for cards to come in the mail.

Bo Jiang, CEO of Lithic, told PYMNTS in an interview that in the digital age, card issuance demands an integrated, platform approach so that users get cards in their hands faster — and companies, well beyond the banking vertical, can scale their businesses with their own branded offerings or control operational spend.

When we think of card issuance, we might not automatically think of innovation. As Jiang said, when individuals think about cards, they tend to think of them as a “monolithic single product.”

Of course, with the great digital shift, card issuance is getting a bit of a technological makeover, which in turn allows companies to create new revenue streams — or, in B2B, gain visibility into and control of employee spending.

Related: B2B Virtual Card Transactions to Top $6T By 2026

Supporting New Use Cases

Depending on the type of card being issued — debit cards are generally easier to issue than credit — the process can take hours, days or weeks. Platforms such as Lithic’s, Jiang said, can help create payment cards in more streamlined fashion to support new B2B use cases.

Lithic says its developer application programming interface (API) gives companies an easy way to integrate the creation and configuration of virtual cards into their business processes. Real-time payment data and card permissioned details travel through one API. Lithic also guides through banking relationships and how to sequence processes, including know your customer (KYC) and compliance.

“The future of FinTech is modular,” he said, “and there is a lot of interesting innovation across the board in KYC, compliance and transaction monitoring.”

Partnership models also help client firms come to market with cards more easily and more quickly, Jiang said.

“Many of the companies we work with today are ones that you don’t actually think of as card and payment companies,” he told PYMNTS.

That roster includes enabling insurance claims disbursements that have historically gone through checks or automated clearing house (ACH), and thus don’t exactly provide a great customer experience, or working with online travel agencies to fulfill flight and travel purchases.

Lithic also works with companies in the incentive space, where it would otherwise be unwieldy to issue $5 and $10 payments over those traditional rails.

With a nod to B2B cards, Jiang said that enterprises are using virtual cards with greater frequency. As he told PYMNTS, spend controls and transaction limits are effective, especially during the work from home pivot, and employees use the cards for disbursements.

There’s a positive ripple effect that accrues as companies embrace those spend controls and transaction monitoring. That level of transparency translates into better cash flow visibility, Jiang said.

“You’re ending up with faster and safer payments, and they’re digitally native,” he said, which means the guessing game of having sent out a check or ACH — and chiefly, when it will be embraced by the receiving party — can be sidestepped.

See also: PYMNTS Intelligence: How Virtual Cards Are Reinventing How Businesses Pay Their Vendors