Commercial Payments International

With cut-throat competition in the B2B payments industry, traditional payments giants are deepening their partnerships with fintechs to dominate the space.

Earlier this year, UK based virtual payments technology company Conferma Pay had partnered with Visa to integrate Visa virtual cards in the Conferma Pay mobile app. This was available to Visa’s commercial bank clients.

This week, Visa and Conferma have expanded their partnership to launch Visa Commercial Pay, a suite of B2B payment products intended to improve cash flow for businesses and eliminated manual processes, a press release noted.

According to the global head of Visa Business Solutions, Kevin Phalen, with the launch of this partnership Visa would be able to accelerate B2B payments away from “slow, outdated methods to fast, data-rich, secure digital payments and give businesses better control over their finances”.

Under this partnership, Visa Commercial Pay would offer three B2B payment offerings. First, Visa Commercial Pay Mobile which is an app developed to help businesses manage and track their spending; including having virtual Visa cards for business purchases and mobile wallet integration.

Second, Visa Commercial Pay Travel enables businesses to manage their business travel spending along with automated expense reconciliation.

Third, Visa Commercial Pay B2B is a platform that gives buyers and suppliers with the flexibility of payment options. It also integrates with third-party procurement platforms.

“With a new economic environment, the controls to decentralize payments have to be put in place and with employees working from home, the ability to monitor, reconcile and approve spend becomes far more difficult,” said Simon Barker, CEO at Conferma Pay.

Adding further, Barker said that the newly launched products would help businesses with “greater visibility and control over B2B spend whilst drastically improving the payment experience for buyers, suppliers, company contractors and employees”.

In separate news, Visa completed its acquisition of YellowPepper, which is a payments company focusing on providing banking solutions to financial institutions in the Latin America region.

While the terms of the acquisition were not disclosed by the company, Visa said this acquisition would enable them with the build on their ‘network of networks’ strategy.

Also, the press release noted that the acquisition of YellowPepper would “reduce issuers’ and processors’ costs and time to launch financial services”. Additionally, through YellowPepper, Visa would be able to “facilitate easier integration with Visa Direct, Visa’s real-time push payments platform, and Visa B2B Connect, Visa’s non-card-based cross-border B2B payment network”.