How to revolutionize your business with virtual credit card payments
Many businesses today are leveraging new payment technologies to issue payments within accounts payable (AP) to streamline processes, cut costs, and reduce risk.
One of the newest forms of electronic payments is Virtual Cards (v-cards), which will make your processes inexpensive, fast, and convenient, all while providing a higher level of security to your company.
Virtual cards and how they benefit AP solutions
What is a virtual card? And what does it mean for B2B payment processing?
A virtual card is a 16-digit credit card number created solely to pay for a transaction or multiple transactions at a predetermined amount. This is done without a physical card, and the card instantly expires after the payment is fully processed by the payee.
Virtual card payments may be used for vendors and suppliers that accept credit card payments today. To the vendor, the virtual card payment looks and works exactly like a credit card payment. Most of the time, vendors will elect to use virtual cards for the more secure nature of the transaction and the expedited timeline for receiving funds.
Payment security: why v-cards are safest
As a CFO or an Accounts Payable Department, you will discover many benefits when using virtual cards, chief among them, the high level of security.
They serve as a buffer between your actual credit card account number and the supplier or vendors you work with. As a result, you don’t have to worry about a vendor or supplier accidentally overpaying themselves, or worse, an outside party intercepting your payment and your purchasing card number and running up fraudulent charges.
Virtual cards provide much more security than physical cards. V-cards allow you to set the dollar amount for payments and connect the payment to invoices of your choice. The 16-digit number is unique for each payment, allowing for a convenient single-use card. Because the card is not physical, it can never be stolen or reused.
CFO’s and financial professionals appreciate the benefits of not having to provide vendors and suppliers with an open line of credit. It’s much more secure and convenient to avoid the risks of theft and fraud by using virtual credit card payments.
How to cut costs with virtual cards
It’s more cost-efficient to use virtual cards than it is to print and mail paper checks.
Frequently, the use of virtual cards replaces the need for issuing checks. The process is paperless, which eliminates the cost and headaches associated with paper checks, envelopes, postage, and processing payments manually. You can also reduce or eliminate many of the human error risks by streamlining your AP payment process with virtual card payments.
One of the most significant advantages of using v-cards is the cash rebates you can receive every month.
Simply put: Rebates improve your cash flow.
The amount of the cash rebates you earn is directly tied to the volume of virtual card payments you make. It’s simple. The more payments you make, the more cashback you’ll earn.
Another exciting feature of virtual cards is that they are not just for large businesses, as some may think. Small and mid-sized companies can also leverage technology to issue card payments to streamline and automate accounts payable processes.
Conclusion
There is no better time to jump on the vCard movement and to start issuing virtual card payments to your suppliers and vendors.
So why not streamline your AP process and get rid of those old, outdated checks? Medius has your answer and can get you started now.
Originally published December 12, 2019. Updated for content and quality on October 5, 2022.
