Mastercard and its partners, TSYS, a Global Payments company, and Extend, today introduced a mobile virtual card solution that enables virtual corporate cards to be easily loaded into a mobile wallet for fast and secure contactless payments.
The new mobile virtual card solution addresses the growing demand for digital, contactless commercial payments, which has been amplified by the changing nature of work and business expenses during the pandemic, and the rise of the work-from-home economy. Previously, one of the main barriers to wider adoption of virtual cards has been the inability to load them into a mobile wallet for use at physical point-of-sale terminals. With this new solution, employees or contractors can load their virtual corporate card into their mobile wallet to easily initiate contactless payments with their mobile device.
The solution uses Mastercard Digital Enablement Services (MDES) to tokenize virtual card numbers (VCNs) for secure mobile payments. MDES turns card numbers into tokens that become useless to fraudsters and eliminates the frustration of manually updating card numbers.
Businesses can use this solution to issue a single or multi-use virtual card to employees, enabling them to fund and manage authorized purchases. TSYS generates the virtual card number, which is accessed in the Extend app and then seamlessly loaded into a mobile wallet.
“Now, more than ever, companies are looking for flexible, virtual payment solutions,” said Ron Shultz, executive vice president, New Payments Business, North America at Mastercard. “By providing a truly virtual end-to-end solution for generating virtual commercial cards and taking them mobile, we’re helping businesses streamline their expense processes while providing employees with fast, simple and secure ways to pay.”
The new virtual card solution will:
- Make paying with a mobile device easier: Users will be able to load the virtual card into their mobile wallet to easily pay with their mobile device for easy, secure transactions at contactless point-of-sale terminals.
- Simplify issuing virtual cards: The program administrator can easily create and issue a virtual card to an employee or contractor via the Extend mobile app or web-based application.
- Provide more control over spending: Companies will be able to easily set controls including specific time frames, amounts, and approved merchant categories.
- Create new opportunities for issuing banks: Issuers are now able to offer mobile VCNs to their corporate clients for carded and non-carded employee use. They can also be instantly issued to an interview candidate for travel costs, or contract workers for the purchasing of supplies and materials.
