Those who follow the B2B payments space will likely have some appreciation for the uptick in system modernization efforts during the past couple of years.
This is a generally overdue effort driven in no small way by demographic shifts that cause migration of personal life tech preferences to business environments, as well as the growing availability of solutions for SMEs, where formerly predominant manual processes can now more quickly fade into analog history.
One of the continuing B2B pain points is in cross-border payment use cases, where a bevy of startups, mature fintechs, networks, and financial institutions have been pouring money and effort into improvements. We cover this as a key forward theme in the 2020 CEP Outlook, soon to be available for public consumption.
In this release posted at Cision PR Newswire, we have an announcement about a Visa collaboration with a 2018 New York City-based startup called Mesh that specializes in cross-border payments for small businesses. In this case, the collaboration involves the use of virtual prepaid commercial cards to pay (and accept payments) for goods and services rendered.
It would appear, based on a website scan, that the sponsoring institution is Metropolitan Commercial Bank out of NYC:
‘”SMBs are going global faster than ever, which is fueling innovation in this space,” stated Oded Zehavi, co-founder and CEO of Mesh. “By working together with Visa as our preferred partner, we are taking the complexity out of payments. With Visa’s global reach and our advanced technology platform, we are enabling payment providers and merchant acquirers to offer all types of businesses globally a frictionless B2B payment option that brings balance into commercial payments.” ‘
The prepaid angle is interesting, since most of the rapid virtual card growth during the past 5 plus years has been on virtual commercial credit for payables use cases. Since small businesses are less likely than larger businesses to gain the type of credit needed to carry required lines for a commercial credit card program, the use of prepaid can be a useful tool, especially to streamline and digitize accounts payable. While we have not yet had a chance to review the platform details, the interface appears to link payments directly from inbound e-mails, and acceptance simplified for suppliers.
‘Mesh is a global B2B payment service that has been built for small businesses and powered by payment service providers (PSPs). The Mesh solution allows suppliers in emerging markets to enable buyers in developed countries to pay through a frictionless process that leverages Visa virtual commercial cards. The Mesh platform is the first to benefit suppliers by reducing the cost of transaction processing while payments are processed automatically through their existing acceptance platform.’
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
