Visa and Conferma Pay are teaming up to roll out a new suite of corporate virtual payments services, six months after the companies forged a partnership to boost virtual card issuance by banks.
Dubbed Visa Commercial Pay, the suite was built upon Conferma's app-based virtual card technology platform and features three tools, each of which uses virtual Visa cards for particular corporate payment scenarios.
One prong of the service trio, Visa Commercial Pay Mobile, enables travellers and contractors to load digitally issued Visa virtual cards onto a mobile device. Once stored, the cards can be used for online purchases or to make in-person transactions, such as meals and taxi rides, via integration with contactless mobile wallets.
As more brick-and-mortar merchants have implemented contactless payment acceptance technology in recent years, mobile wallets increasingly have become a popular delivery channel for virtual payment cards—especially as a method to solve longstanding issues with the check-in process for hotel bookings made via virtual cards. Meanwhile, increased health and hygiene concerns amid the Covid-19 pandemic have driven a surge in demand for contactless options for all types of in-person payments, thereby furthering the case for combining mobile wallets and virtual cards.
The virtual payments suite also features Visa Commercial Pay Travel, which integrates virtual card issuance and payments directly into corporate booking tools. The third service, Visa Commercial Pay B2B, enables virtual cards to be used for general corporate procurement purposes.
The Visa Commercial Pay platform is being targeted at corporate card issuer banks, which can offer any combination of the three services to their corporate clients. In May 2020, Visa and Conferma signed a global agreement to make it easier for banks to issue Visa virtual cards by using Conferma's platform.