The B2B digital cash cycle is becoming increasingly important as businesses recognize the limitations of manual financial processes and look for more efficient ways to manage payments. Integrating commercial cards and other digital payment methods into procurement and accounting workflows can help organizations improve visibility, control costs, and reduce their reliance on checks.
Virtual card accounts are one tool helping businesses modernize these processes. By supporting automation, working capital management, spend visibility, and fraud reduction, virtual cards can play a growing role as companies seek to make complex B2B payment workflows more efficient.
Consistently improving the product and delivery systems pays dividends. This includes the B2B digital cash cycle. Incremental and ongoing improvement is the hallmark of the commercial credit card industry. In these tough times, making things easier for clients will help revive spend.
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Data for today’s episode is provided by Mercator Advisory Group’s report – Steady Progress Through Easing the Experience: Commercial Cards Success Prescription
B2B Digital Cash Cycle Becomes Crucial in Post-pandemic World:
- Integration of card-based accounts into the financial cycle is key to gaining more share of the opportunity in B2B digital payments as check usage declines.
- One positive effect of the pandemic is corporations’ realization of the deficiencies of analog processes vs. digital processes.
- Typical procure-to-pay processes involve multiple procurement and accounting modules, countless levels of workflow and approval, bank payment, and reconciliation.
- Given the large number of transactions firms execute daily, visibility and control of spend management is hampered, and the cost of payments and risk management is tricky.
- One solution is virtual card accounts, which generate a unique 16 digit card number and process like any card-not-present transaction.
- The benefits of virtual card accounts include efficiency in automation, improved working capital, greater visibility and control, and reduced fraud.
About Report
This Viewpoint, Steady Progress Through Easing the Experience: Commercial Cards Success Prescription, summarizes Mercator’s take on key technology trends and the focus of the commercial card industry as economies and card revenues recover from the recessionary environment created by federal, state and local government policy dictates in response to the pandemic