Mastercard is aiming to make virtual card transactions more efficient, safe, and economical to process through its new Mastercard Receivables Manager solution.
“We’re bridging the gap between buyers’ virtual card preferences and suppliers’ acceptance challenges by automating manual processes and transforming the way accounts receivable teams operate,” said Chad Wallace, Global Head of Commercial Solutions at Mastercard in a prepared statement.
Mastercard Receivables Manager is powered by Billtrust, a B2B order-to-cash software and digital payments provider that helps suppliers receive virtual card payments more easily, with minimal implementation effort. Suppliers will also be able to accept virtual cards at scale, while businesses will also get to boost their card spend.
Through Mastercard Receivables Manager, it’s no longer necessary for suppliers to manually capture and enter virtual card information to reconcile the substantial number of digital payments received. Instead, the new solution combines the card payments from all issuers so that the remittance information can be matched automatically to open invoices. Then they are formatted and delivered for their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. This enables suppliers to reconcile invoices both accurately and efficiently.
Currently, the solution is only available to U.S.-based customers, but Mastercard hopes to expand to more markets later this year.
A More Digital Payment Future
According to RPMG Research Corporation’s Virtual Card Benchmark Survey results for 2022, more than 90% of suppliers reported that they preferred to receive a digital payment and the invoice information associated with it, instead of checks.
We previously detailed how B2B digital payments are the future of the payments industry. Physical checks have long been a hassle for business, mostly because they take longer to process, they’re more expensive, and they have a higher propensity for both fraud and errors.
Conversely, digital payments are faster, more efficient, with greater security, lower fees, and easier for record keeping.