They say you can never get enough of a good thing.

This certainly holds true for certain food items...especially if you’ve ever had Krispy Kreme’s when that magical red light is on in the window, but I digress.  In the realm of B2B payments and ePayments, one thing that you can’t get enough of is virtual card payments.  We’ve covered this in detail over here, and while we won’t go into the full laundry list of details that encompass the reasons why virtual card payments make sense, one of the big reasons is they make cents...lots of cents...specifically percents.  It’s no mystery that virtual card payments represent a means by which businesses can monetize their payment stream and thus make their back office a huge contributor to the fiscal health of the organization, but way beyond that, the security of said financial transactions can be greatly increased through this novel approach to payments.

Sometimes with change you typically encounter turbulence.  

One manner of turbulence that is a byproduct of the disruption that is happening in this specific type of payment is the adoption on the supplier side.  While suppliers are typically eager to cash in on the payments due to them, there is sometimes a sticky barrier to allowing for card payments because of the manual entry and reconciliation of these payments.  However, according to PYMNTS.com that specific item is even being addressed through service providers who are automating how the booking of virtual card payments is occurring, which in layman’s terms is very cool.  This means the pathway becomes smooth and mutually advantageous while providing a welcome financial incentive to adopt this payment mechanism to the payor.

So, for the duration of this article we want to focus on the security components that are enhanced through these newer virtual card payment types.  

1. Invoices are paid via a single use virtual card account so there’s no data to steal and the account is funded just for that single transaction, which can encompass one or multiple invoices.  This means card data, where other might have used a regular card to pay invoices, can’t be used to pay things fraudulently and the exposure is minimal as it is isolated.
2. Payment requests / invocation can be made to travel through an approval workflow, thereby securing the necessary stakeholders and authority, again cutting down the chances for fraudulent payments by way of visibility to a matter.
3. Greater control for the timeline of payments is achieved through virtual card payments.  Instead of having to deal with physical output of a check and then the correlating wait for transit times, handling, and deposit times, these transactions are deliberate, scheduled, and prompt.

To learn more about how to extend the use of virtual cards in your organization, check out this brief here.

Virtual payments represent one of the four significant pillars that can contribute to maximum health in your AP organization, but there are various other ways you can extract even more value from this function.