PAYMENTS
VIRTUAL
Virtual realities C
Amon Cohen asks whether virtual payments will become the new norm, and what this means for business travel expense management
orporate payment professionals are not, by and large, a gregarious bunch. Years of compliance training,
plus wrestling with the finer points of accounts payable reconciliation, treasury relationships and automated uploads to enterprise resource planning applications, can dampen the impulse for excitement, adventure and knockabout slapstick humour. Payment pros are not the party animals of the travel management industry – not like those crazy car rental or serviced apartment people, at any rate.
12 • Buying Business Travel 2013 Yet there is one subject which
causes even the most staid banker to break into a wide grin and start evangelising about the biggest transformation they have seen in their line of business for decades. The revolution that is happening right now is virtual card numbers, also known as single-use accounts. “Virtual card numbers are going to be the biggest change we will see in the payment industry in the next five to ten years because they solve a series of problems for travel management companies [TMCs] and their clients,” says Helen Mason, director, senior commercial card
product manager, EMEA, for Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
MASSIVE GROWTH Mason is not alone in the boldness of her predictions. Corporate Pay CEO Myles Stephenson says “virtual card payments will become the norm”. Issuers report massive growth over the past 18 months, admittedly from a low base. Citi says the volume of virtual card numbers it issued last year was more than double the figure for 2011, and that it expects transactions to more than treble in 2013. Barclaycard and Airplus International say virtual numbers
In association with
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