Visa, Taulia Team on Embedded Finance as Credit Grows Scarce

Visa has launched a collaboration with SAP-owned working capital management solutions provider Taulia.

The partnership, announced Tuesday (March 12), brings together Visa’s digital payments technology and Taulia Virtual Cards, a solution that integrates with SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) offerings and business applications.

“Visa and Taulia’s partnership will simplify payments across the business ecosystem by enabling virtual payment credentials to work natively across SAP business applications,” the companies said in a news release. “Through the planned integration, Visa’s APIs will embed virtual payment credentials, acceptance and enablement solutions directly into SAP business applications.”

The release noted that corporate buyers are using embedded virtual cards to streamline the payment experience, letting users remain in their ERP or business applications. The companies said their solution will help finance chiefs, procurement departments and accounts payable teams automate payments to suppliers.

This is “especially helpful for paying one-time suppliers as this eliminates the need to create full master data in the system, a process that can take weeks or even months,” the release said.

The Visa/Taulia team-up follows a similar partnership from last November involving Taulia and Mastercard. It’s also happening as companies are employing working capital management strategies that leverage commercial and virtual cards to manage their B2B spending and make sure they have cash to handle unforeseen expenses.

“Even firms in traditional industries like the transportation and logistics sector, where lockboxes and paper checks abound, are revisiting commercial cards as a versatile tool for managing various aspects of their operations and employee spend,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this week.

This transition is being sped by the commercial landscape shifting toward a more equitable sharing of credit card transaction costs. In the past, sellers bore the brunt of these costs, but the value proposition for each party involved in a B2B card transaction is being continually reassessed, that report said.

Meanwhile, working capital continues to grow more and more scarce for businesses, according to the latest edition of the Federal Reserve Beige Book survey.

“Banking contacts also indicated that credit standards tightened, particularly for business loans and commercial mortgages,” the survey said. “While deposit rates held steady, loan spreads narrowed, and delinquencies continued to rise. Banks and business clients agreed that higher interest rates had lowered demand for loans, while tighter access to credit had lowered the potential supply.”

PYMNTS Intelligence research, meanwhile, has found that less than half of firms with up to $10 million in annual revenues say they had access to business or personal financing.

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