City National Bank joins with Extend to launch commercial card solutions
Virtual cards have been a hot product during the pandemic as they bring transparency and simplicity to businesses as well as employees. Now traditional bank card issuers are jumping on the bandwagon.
This week, California headquartered City National Bank joined hands with Extend, a New York-based fintech to launch a virtual Visa commercial credit card solution.
Last year, Mastercard, Extend and TSYS launched virtual cards and last week, Infineon partnered with Mastercard to launch virtual cards for employees.
Under this partnership, the bank would offer virtual cards which, according to the bank, come with digital capabilities, distinct spending limits and expiration dates to employees, contractors and vendors. The cards will also give companies more oversight and control over their corporate cards.
The virtual cards can be enabled in digital wallets and employees, contractors and vendors can use these cards for online purchases or add them to to Google Pay and Apple Pay mobile wallets for contactless payments at POS systems.
“Until now, no one has been able to tokenize true virtual cards for mobile wallets, which brings virtual cards to the point of sale, a hurdle that has stood in the way of serious mass adoption. Now virtual cards can be used just like plastic cards”, said Andrew Jamison, CEO and co-founder of Extend.
The press release notes the highlights of these virtual cards as they ‘make it easier for clients to issue credit cards to their employees’, ‘simplify the payment process’ and ‘provide enhanced security’ with Visa’s tokenization technology.
“Our collaboration with City National Bank and Extend to bring Visa virtual card capabilities to their commercial clients delivers innovation that makes B2B payments as simple and effortless as consumer payments are today,” said Kevin Phalen, global head, Visa Business Solutions.