Virtual Expense Cards are digital payment tools that simplify and enhance B2B transactions. Unlike physical credit or debit cards, these virtual cards operate online, making them ideal for card-not-present purchases. Incorporating them into your financial toolkit can revolutionize expense management, control spending, and streamline payment processes.
As businesses evolve in the digital age, financial transactions significantly transform too. For B2B payments, embracing innovative solutions can streamline operations, boost security, and enhance efficiency. One groundbreaking tool gaining popularity is the Virtual Expense Card.
In this blog post, we'll delve into Virtual Expense Cards and explore how they empower businesses with enhanced security, improved expense tracking, and simplified payments. Let's unlock the potential of this innovative solution and witness the advantages it brings to B2B payments.
Virtual expense cards are prepaid cards employees can use to securely make purchases online and over the phone. These cards work like physical cards, allowing businesses to issue 16-digit numbers in a few clicks. To the merchant, there's no difference from any other payment. Still, neither employees nor merchants can access bank information. This adds a layer of security to the transaction.
Virtual expense cards give finance teams better control and visibility over company spending. For Accounts Payable (AP) teams, processes become simpler and more efficient, protecting all parties in a transaction against fraud. Some virtual card providers even offer reward points to use on payables or expenses or redeemed for cashback.
Virtual expense cards allow businesses to create a unique 16-digit virtual account number (VANs). This number acts as a temporary alias for a bank account. From the processing side, they are treated like regular credit cards during a transaction, except the factual payment information is locked away behind a randomized token that makes these credentials unreadable to fraudsters. It's one of the most effective ways to protect personally identifiable information (PII).
For employees to start making purchases, they must first be assigned access to funds. That's why one of virtual expense cards' core use cases is expense management.
Virtual expense cards are appealing because they make it easier to make purchases while reducing the friction of expense approval. Corporate credit cards usually require employees to pay for something upfront and fill out an expense report to get paid back. They risk being hooked to pay that charge if an expense is not approved.
With virtual cards, businesses can move to a request-based process that issues cards to employees when spend is required. This flips the switch and ensures your business has visibility of spend before it happens, reducing erroneous spending and the back-end work required to track and report expenses.
Other everyday use cases for virtual expense cards are:
Virtual expense cards provide too many benefits for employees and businesses to be ignored. They make it easier to make payments, reduce the risk of fraud, and make managing your company and employee spending easier and more flexible. They also add powerful automation and efficiency to your business, allowing you to eliminate the inefficient AP processes and systems that add hours of data entry and manual work to your team's workload.
If you're looking for an automated AP solution for your business. In that case, Paystand's DeFi Card can give you a flexible way to manage, optimize, and automate your expense management process.
Whether you are looking for a one-stop payment shop or need answers to your questions, our payment experts are here to improve your business. Book a demo today!