Virtual cards have been a popular option for consumers for years, but they’re just now gaining traction among businesses. With an increasingly globalized economy, corporate entities are seeking efficient ways to move money across borders, and virtual cards are filling that role—maximizing efficiency while reducing costs.

Mark Anthony Spiteri, Global Head of Card Business at Nium, sat down with Brian Riley, Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, during a PaymentsJournal podcast to discuss the growing demand for B2B cross-border payments and the emerging use cases driving their adoption in industries like insurance and travel.

B2B payments have been a cornerstone of commerce for decades, but like many other aspects of business, the pandemic brought significant changes. For one, companies had to grapple with the possibility of their suppliers going out of business. This created an urgent need for processes that could move funds quickly between merchants and suppliers, ensuring payments were delivered reliably.

Post-pandemic, many companies diversified their supply chains to reduce risk and work with multiple global suppliers The challenge, however, is that the payment rails in some of these countries may have not been tried and tested. Fundamentally, businesses need assurance that they can pay and get paid quickly, cost-effectively, and reliably across borders.

Since the pandemic, two additional factors have been changing the fundamental nature of B2B payments. The first is the impact of volatility.

”At the moment there’s a lot of volatility across the political landscape,” said Spiteri. “We saw what happened in the U.S. election and how the Asian market reacted, with significant impact to the Chinese Yuan. Suddenly, there was a lot of fluctuation in FX. If that happens, you need to be able to control those payments in a way that you can predict exactly what’s going to happen. It needs to be accurate, reliable, and in real-time.”

The second is the increasingly complex regulatory landscape. Given the heightened scrutiny from regulators, it has become more difficult for businesses to rely on a single payment method for global transactions.

The immediacy of virtual cards has helped alleviate many of these concerns.

“Something I’ve always liked is how quickly you could settle real-time payments across borders,” said Riley. “The Eurozone was a leader in real-time payments, but now it’s moving through many different countries, and it’s finally in the U.S. These payments settle once they hit the books, and they clear very quickly and safely.”

As a self-confessed ‘cards guy’, in Spiteri’s opinion the biggest challenge with real-time cross-border payments is how you connect a fragmented landscape of localized, regional networks around the world. In addition to global real-time payment networks like that offered by Nium, this is where virtual cards come into play. Being able to move money quickly and securely across borders with virtual cards is a powerful way for businesses to improve liquidity and cash flow management.

“Before it was like, pay in 30 days, or pay in 60 days, right?” said Spiteri. “Now, you can pay now. And one of the best ways to do that effectively and guarantee when the payment will arrive is with a virtual card.”

One key difference between virtual cards and other real-time payment methods is the chargeback protection that cards offer. If a supplier or merchant goes bankrupt, buyers are guaranteed to recover their funds.

Virtual cards also offer better controls. When employees use corporate cards, for example, it can be difficult to reconcile transactions and track where payments are going. Overall, they offer more flexibility. They can be configured as single-use or multi-use cards. A virtual card might be restricted to a specific merchant, set for a particular spending limit, or designated for use only at restaurants. This level of customization gives finance and procurement teams more control and granularity—and provides real-time transaction information to the employer.

“From the use cases I’m familiar with, where most cards are single-use, it simplifies reconciliation dramatically,” said Spiteri. “You can match the card to the original transaction, automatically plug the information into your ERP or accounting system, and you have end-to-end matching.”

The travel industry was among the first to adopt this technology, primarily due to the immediate need for liquid cash flow and guaranteed payment protection. For every online booking, travel agencies and other intermediaries  must make payments to their airline and hotel suppliers around the world. Travel companies of all kinds also face sizable expenses, such as fuel purchases, often in cross-border locations. For instance, when planes require maintenance, businesses need the ability to quickly and securely transfer funds to cover repair costs.

Nium is also seeing strong demand in the B2B insurance sector, working with leading insurance firms to deliver innovative virtual card solutions. In one use case, Nium is the global issuer behind the launch of a new healthcare payment card, enabling members to pay for eligible outpatient treatment without using their funds, needing to submit a claim, or contacting their insurer to pre-authorise their treatment before they pay it.

“If I’m travelling and have an accident abroad, I need to find the hospital and get treatment urgently,” said Spiteri. “I pay with my own credit card, then I have to fill out some forms, then claim it back, then send it to my insurer, and so forth. Even then, I may not be reimbursed if my claim doesn’t meet the criteria of my cover plan. It’s a complicated process that is very time consuming, both for the customer and the businesses involved as money can take time to flow between the insurer and the hospital.”

“With the real-time healthcare payment card, now when I’m travelling and something happens, I can generate a virtual card on the insurance app in my Apple Pay or Google Pay wallet. When I pay for the treatment, it’s actually the insurer paying the medical facility immediately. No reimbursement headaches. All I have to do is upload an image of the treatment invoice to the app to be processed.”

Expect to see consolidation in the B2B payments industry in the coming years. The focus will likely shift toward addressing challenges like those in the insurance sector—a need that forward-thinking companies like Nium are already anticipating and solving.

“With consumer payments, you make a solution work,” said Spiteri. “You don’t throw everything at it and hope that it works, or else no one will use it. And that’s what’s going to happen in the B2B space. This will drive consolidation and increase the focus on solving tangible business problems with innovative payment solutions.”