Business-to-business (B2B) payments dominate the global payments landscape, and Visa is launching a platform designed to connect the major players.
The card company noted that its Commercial Integrated Partners program provides an ecosystem that banks can leverage to offer enterprise clients a range of services, including expense management, a mobile app, and tokenization of virtual cards.
In this model, Visa’s APIs are the rails through which banks can both access products from fintechs and embed them into their business clients’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. The objective is to deliver a plug-and-play solution that enables all parties to focus their time and resources on innovation and improving the customer experience.
“This is an interesting announcement,” said Hugh Thomas, Lead Commercial and Enterprise analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research. “The most analogous thing I can think of at Mastercard is their Accelerate program, which takes in things like Start Path and Fintech Express. There are a few big differences here, but the biggest one to my mind is the focus on commercial.”
“Where Mastercard’s Accelerate initiatives run the gamut from emerging solutions like blockchain to consumer-focused offerings like P2P payments to B2B stuff, this Visa program is strictly focused on commercial,” he said. “This seems smart to me, because the ecosystem for commercial payments definitely has a shorter and more manageable set of potential partners, and the forces that drive change are totally different from what you see in the consumer world.”
Speeding the Fleet
As an example, Visa spotlighted its partnership with fleet technology provider Car IQ, best known for software that turns a vehicle into a payment credential. Physical cards still dominate the fleet management industry and are often a pain point due to the risk of loss or misuse.
Through Commercial Integrated Partners, a financial institution could provide Car IQ software to its business customers, enabling virtual card payments through a mobile app at fuel stations.
Visa noted that this type of integration reduces the need for extensive supplier onboarding or development and could potentially save a company “18-24 months of due diligence, integration work and project management.”
What it Says on the Tin
For all the potential benefits of this model, financial institutions will likely have concerns about the security of their data once it is shared with more parties. These concerns have become especially prominent following the collapse of fintech Synapse, which left millions of dollars of its bank client’s funds in jeopardy.
To address these concerns, Visa stated that all fintech partners on the Commercial Integrated Partners platform are pre-evaluated and already integrated with the card company.
“The other thing that struck me was the notion of certification,” Thomas said. “Certifying solutions presumes you have the in-house expertise to not only understand your own products but are able to certify their use in others’ products.”
“It’s a great idea in principle—enabling issuers and other partners to avoid 18 months of certification work before they can launch something that will drive spend volume. But in practice, you’re also then on the hook for whether or not the thing does what it says on the tin,” he said. “It certainly says something about the commitment to growing the card network-driven commercial ecosystem that they’re willing to play this role.”
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