To put it simply, a virtual credit card is a card that isn’t tangible and is completely digital. It has a Card Security Code (CSC), a Card Verification Value (CVV) and an expiration date for a single traveler’s expenses. The card numbers are generated instantly and preloaded with total available spend. You can place controls on the card, such as effective dates and merchant category codes, which really assist in the security of virtual cards. It is a simplified, expedited and more secure purchase process for business travel and expense.
There are a lot of benefits to virtual payment: You can prevent overpaying, set controls, easily pay for non-employee travel, interviewees, eliminate risk and fraud, control what payments are really for, ensure compliance over corporate travel policy, and more. The benefits are huge, especially as we move into 2022 and corporations are beginning to re-enter the corporate travel space.
Moving Forward with Business Travel
According to a poll done by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) in February 2022, “Three in four (78%) supplier and travel management company (TMC) professionals surveyed currently feel optimistic about the business travel industry’s path to recovery, up from 54% who reported being optimistic in the January poll.” Additionally, “Four in five (82%) poll respondents feel their employees are ‘willing’ or ‘very willing’ to travel for business in the current environment, compared to 64% in the January poll.”
In the summer of 2021, Juniper Research found that, “The global value of virtual card transactions will reach $6.8 trillion in 2026, from $1.9 trillion in 2021. Virtual cards, secure digital cards with randomly generated details, will show strong growth as they are increasingly used for B2B payments.” The report further identified that the simplicity of virtual cards are becoming much more preferable compared to expensive and slow methods still being used today.
With Virtual Payment projected to grow exponentially in the coming years, let’s examine the process from when a virtual card is issued, to when it is used by the traveler, and how the resulting data is processed and utilized.
