Visa launches B2B virtual payment solutions, savings & tools

By Jeff Domansky, Nov 23, 2020

Visa and Conferma Pay, announced a strategic partnership to launch Visa Commercial Pay, a suite of B2B payment solutions designed to improve cash flow for businesses and eliminate outdated manual processes.

Visa Commercial Pay provides comprehensive card-program management capabilities, including on-demand virtual card issuance to employees’ mobile devices via an app, created exclusively by Conferma Pay and Visa, for Visa’s commercial clients. Visa Commercial Pay also simplifies money movement between buyers and suppliers and features enhanced data, automated payment processing, and expense reconciliation.

New secure digital features

The new Visa services feature three B2B payment offerings for financial institutions and their corporate customers:

Visa Commercial Pay Mobile: a Visa-branded app, developed by Conferma Pay and Visa for Visa’s commercial clients, can add digitally-issued Visa virtual commercial cards to employee and contractor mobile devices. The app helps businesses manage and track spending without issuing and mailing physical credit cards. Employees can use on-demand, virtual Visa cards for their business purchases online purchases or in-store with tap-to-pay capability, and seamless integration into mobile wallets.
Visa Commercial Pay Travel: enables businesses to manage business travel spending such as air and hotel by easily integrating into business travel reservation, and delivering enhanced data, spending visibility, and automated expense reconciliation. Employees and contractors can view reservations and total spending within the app.
Visa Commercial Pay B2B: combines the capabilities of Visa and Conferma Pay to give buyers and suppliers more options to pay and get paid. It helps companies manage cash flow and capture enhanced data for faster reconciliation and reporting. Visa Commercial Pay B2B lets companies select a single comprehensive program management platform or a seamlessly-integrated solution into third-party platforms.

“Businesses are turning to Visa and our clients with a great sense of urgency to help them solve payment inefficiencies that the pandemic has quickly exposed,” said Kevin Phalen, global head, Visa Business Solutions. “The launch of Visa Commercial Pay in partnership with Conferma Pay allows us to accelerate B2B money movement away from slow, outdated methods to fast, data-rich, secure digital payments and give businesses better control over their finances.”

Visa says commercial clients can leverage the Visa Commercial Pay suite of solutions without any additional development or operational complexity that often comes with launching new services. Financial institutions can use Visa’s new set of virtual-card capabilities in their entirety or a la carte to meet their clients’ needs quickly.

“With a new economic environment, the controls to decentralize payments have to be put in place, and with employees working from home, the ability to monitor, reconcile and approve spend becomes far more difficult,” said Simon Barker, CEO at Conferma Pay. “With the Visa Commercial Pay initiative, we are excited to partner with Visa and help businesses gain greater visibility and control over B2B spend whilst drastically improving the payment experience for buyers, suppliers, company contractors, and employees.”

Founded in 2005 in Manchester, UK, Conferma Pay provides virtual payments technology to major global payments cards and more than 50 bank partners and connects more than 700 travel companies and 100 online booking tools. More information about Visa Commercial Pay is available via VisaCommercialPay@visa.com.