Visa and First Abu Dhabi Bank team up on B2B virtual cards
Middle Eastern commercial payments are heating up with banks and non-bank payment companies vying to launch services in the region. Recently Mastercard partnered with Network International to expand its operations in the Middle-East and Africa while Emirates NBD launched its international payments operations which were based on TCS BaNCS for Payments.
In such, UAE based financial institution, First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) has partnered with Visa to launch a suite of digital payment solutions for corporate clients.
Companies such as Mastercard partnered with TSYS and Extend to launch virtual card solutions and Wells Fargo also jumped into this space last quarter.
The collaboration also unveiled a Central Travel Account solution under which it would make it easier for companies to manage travel payments ‘by consolidating and matching key travel data with transactional financial data’. This would help businesses to make detailed reports, track and manage their travel spends.
“In partnership with Visa, we have been working on strengthening our payments solutions for corporates and businesses”, said Ramana Kumar, EVP and Head of Payments and Digital Banking, Personal Banking Group, FAB. Adding further he said this collaboration would let them continue with the development of relevant solutions.
FAB also launched Visa Virtual Corporate Cards in the UAE which is supported by Visa’s Payables Automation (VPA) solution. According to the press release, ‘VPA is designed to deliver transaction processing and remittance posting of virtual card payments to suppliers’. It helps businesses by ‘saving time, reducing labour costs, improving cash flow, and providing better security against fraud’.
Visa’s General Manager for the UAE, Shahebaz Khan noted in the press release that Visa Central Travel Account and Virtual Corporate Cards are both widely accepted digital forms of payments for B2B transactions and these ‘solutions provide an increased layer of security and visibility and help to lower the costs of doing business by providing easy reconciliations and worldwide acceptance’.