JPMorgan Chase announced that its virtual card solution has been successfully implemented by the U.S. Department of Energy and its key contractor, CH2M-WG Idaho LLC, in a program that recently received the “SmartPay 2 Innovation Award” from the U.S. General Services Administration.
Chase has been a SmartPay provider since the commercial card program was launched by the U.S. General Services Administration in 1998. While so-called virtual cards, ghost cards, and one-time use cards have been gaining ground as payment methods in private industry, they have not previously been used at significant scale by the federal government.
According to the press release from Global Commercial Card Solutions at JPMorgan:
DOE is the first federal agency to successfully implement the use of J.P. Morgan’s SUA [Single Use Account] solution as a method of payment. Similarly, CWI is the first federal contractor to do so. In the first year of implementing SUA, CWI converted 62 percent of their top 100 vendors to SUA. This represents 68 percent of the card spending by these top 100 vendors.
Given that one of the challenges of implementing such programs is convincing suppliers to accept card-networked transactions as a payment method, CH2M-WG Idaho appears to have achieved significant adoption rates among its largest vendors. The U.S. General Services Administration will continue to emphasize the adoption of SmartPay methods whenever possible, and the implementation of virtual card solutions suggests that Smart Pay volumes could resume a growth trend.
Click here to read the press release about this announcement.
