As consumers, we hail a ride with a couple taps, and when leaving the vehicle, we know the transaction has been completed without even checking our phone. The payment process is seamless – an invisible engine that operates in the background with little thought or energy expended on our part. But if we think about the day in the life of a business and/or professional, the payments experiences we’ve come to expect as consumers – fast, simple and convenient – are still relatively nascent. 

Corporates have traditionally been far slower to adopt new technologies for managing finances. Take, for example, business travel and expense management. The technology exists for a completely digitized experience, where receipt capture and submission are possible in real time as we leave a client dinner. But in reality, business travelers are too often faced with the impending doom of filing an expense report upon their return to office, including scanning and uploading a mountain of receipts.  

On the other side of the equation, given the need to focus on employee experience, fintechs and institutions are waking up to this opportunity to accelerate the pace of B2B payments innovation and ease the monetary burdens for corporates across the globe. At Mastercard, our unique network perspective, global footprint, and engineering expertise and scale puts us in the front seat for this transformation. We are collaborating with financial institutions, fintechs and corporates alike, to pioneer a new way of doing business when it comes to business payments. 

The advent of the smartphone and app store has enabled the mass distribution of payments solutions to consumers globally. In the workplace, there are different dynamics at play when it comes to adopting new technology – from data security and compliance requirements to complex technical implementations – which has inherently resulted in a larger adoption curve. The rise of technology innovations, such as application programming interfaces (APIs) and the migration to the cloud, is enabling banks and fintechs to design and deliver embedded financial products. And with those integrated experiences, the once-steep adoption curve is slowly starting to flatten. 

At Mastercard, we’re focused on accelerating the digitization of B2B payments for corporates with minimal cost and disruption. One way in which we’re driving this behavioral shift is by embedding virtual card payments into the platforms that enterprises are already organizing their businesses around. We are pursuing integrations with procurement and enterprise resource planning systems to place virtual cards at the center of the tools that businesses use day to day. The payment becomes a natural extension of their operations, where the payment happens in the background, similar to that seamless experience of hailing and paying for a ride as a consumer. 

Chad Wallace is the Global Head of Commercial Solutions at Mastercard and a member of the Management Committee. He leads the company's product, engineering, and business development functions for B2B products. He is responsible for overseeing Mastercard’s Commercial Card offerings, including T&E, Purchasing, Fleet and virtual card solutions, while also driving the digital transformation of corporate payments across accounts payable, procurement and treasury.