Visa, a global leader in digital payments, and Conferma Pay, the world’s foremost providers of virtual payments technology,  announced an extension of their strategic collaboration aimed at further enhancing Visa Commercial Pay, a suite of B2B payment solutions, to help improve cashflow for businesses and eliminate outdated manual processes.

With virtual commercial cards at its core, Visa Commercial Pay features three B2B payment offerings for financial institutions and their corporate customers, including Visa Commercial Pay Mobile app, Visa Commercial Pay Travel and Visa Commercial Pay B2B. Since its launch in 2020, Visa Commercial Pay has helped corporates to move away from traditional business payment methods, to more automated processes.

Visa Commercial Pay has been rolled out to select clients, including early adopters such as Commerce Bank, OCBC, and Umpqua Bank. The offering empowers financial institutions to deliver on their corporate customers’ virtual payments strategy and continues to drive innovation with connectivity to market-leading invoice management platforms – all through a single connection. This process improves cashflow for businesses and eliminates outdated manual processes.

“The pandemic exposed significant inefficiencies with traditional payment methods used by businesses,” said Gloria Colgan, Senior Vice President, Global Product Visa Commercial Solutions. “Our collaboration with Conferma Pay brings together two leaders in their respective fields and the result is a far more efficient payments system. With our collaboration set to continue, more clients and end users will be able to take advantage of new features such as the digital wallet tokenization and hotel cards.”

The four-year extension secures additional investment to further develop the suite of B2B payment solutions and signals a renewed joint commitment to making virtual commercial payments more widely available. The extended collaboration enables both organizations to further expand the offering in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, with the enhanced security, compliance and control provided by Visa Commercial Pay being an incredibly important driver for issuers seeking to reduce the risk of fraud on behalf of their corporate clients.

“The world has been increasingly moving towards more digitized payments and the launch of Visa Commercial Pay has supported this transition in the commercial payments environment. Our deeper engagement with Visa will help to rapidly accelerate the growth of virtual payments for businesses,” said Jason Lalor, CEO, Conferma Pay. “We have a fantastic working relationship with Visa that has enabled the rapid delivery of software to simplify payments for businesses globally. Based on our shared vision for a more digitized payment landscape, our expanding network of B2B partners means that Visa Commercial Pay will continue to grow and remove more barriers to business.”

A key innovation within Visa Commercial Pay, which is set to help revolutionize digital payments in the travel sector, is the ability for virtual corporate cards to be added directly to a digital wallet on an employee’s mobile phone. This enables corporates to centrally manage payments, while giving employees all the benefits and security of card-in-hand products. This innovative solution greatly improves the travel experience for all parties by accessing contactless payments without the need to have details cross-checked at hotel arrival.

New issuing partners gain instant access to the network of platforms already connected to Visa Commercial Pay, meaning Visa’s commercial clients can use the suite of solutions across multiple commercial-spend use cases, without any additional development or operational complexity that often comes with launching new capabilities.