High competition between traditional banks and fintech companies in payment services for customers encourages banks to implement new digital solutions, in particular in the field of payment cards. As a result, OCBC Bank became the first in the world to offer its customers the use of the Visa Commercial Pay mobile solution as part of its first offer for virtual purchase cards.

The OCBC Virtual Purchasing Card has become a new digital product for making payments both in business and for the needs of individual customers. This is because such a digital payment product allows companies to digitize and organize all their payment requirements automatically. Cross-checks, as well as high transparency of key cost categories, allow them to effectively negotiate prices with service providers and reduce transaction fees.

An effective solution for the payment market is that Visa Commercial Pay mobile allows employees and non-employees of corporate clients of the bank to request virtual cards on demand through their mobile application and use virtual cards for mobile contactless payments, payment through the application and via the Internet at all merchants taking Visa. In addition, this card can be issued instantly, even for special operations.

The positive factor is that this product is integrated and contains two other offers for B2B payments – Visa Commercial Pay B2B and travel Visa Commercial Pay. Note that Visa Commercial Pay B2B is a digital platform that allows corporations to generate unique virtual card numbers with predefined control parameters and customized data fields for each invoice payment to their suppliers. Instead, Visa Commercial Pay Travel allows companies to centrally manage travel expenses such as air travel, hotels, rail and car rentals. So, with virtual commercial cards at its core, Visa Commercial Pay features three B2B payment offerings for financial institutions and their corporate customers, including Visa Commercial Pay Mobile app, Visa Commercial Pay Travel and Visa Commercial Pay B2B.

The use of a virtual card is easily integrated into business travel booking processes and can provide advanced business trip data, cost transparency and automatic cost matching through the use of unique virtual card numbers for each booking.

Innovative virtual cards within the OCBC Virtual Purchasing Card program can be of different types with predefined management parameters, payment limits, validity and categories of goods or services for virtual payments.

Thanks to these functions and characteristics, the OCBC virtual card will have a number of competitive advantages over the traditional payment card, and will help strengthen the bank’s position in the financial market by satisfying  the needs of more customers.

Prospects for virtual financial solutions are also high due to the growing popularity of digital payments during the pandemic period. The world is unlikely to return to the classic financial instruments, as the needs of participants in financial decisions have changed significantly, and innovation always follows the most pressing needs of the modern world and demand from customers.

The same opinion is shared by other financial market experts. In particular, according to the research by the Mercator Group, which specializes in global payments, the implementation of virtual card solutions by companies in the Asia-Pacific region will increase by 40 percent over the next four years, and the use of financial solutions will replace manual reimbursement and reconciliation processes a convenient alternative that saves time for employees. According to the Mercator Group report the world continues to move in the direction of electronic payments, and this movement represents ongoing opportunity for card schemes across the globe. Companies operating in both developed and developing economies seek more efficiencies and value from business-to-business (B2B) invoiced payments, which card schemes can provide through credit facilities, potential revenue share, and “risk-minimized” virtual card accounts.

The virtual card will also spread rapidly due to the high security of payment decisions on the blockchain and the much higher speed of financial transactions.

Undoubtedly, innovative products and modern solutions in the field of digital payments create new challenges for financial sector regulators to ensure proper compliance, financial security and verification of business companies involved in virtual payments and actively using virtual cards. However, the effective integration of virtual payments with the Visa system will allow you to apply the existing positive experience in regulating payment services and use modern platforms for proper customer verification.

Thus, the financial market is undergoing significant changes and transformations, and world popular banks that want to keep up with the times find unconventional solutions in the area of payments and are actively integrating into virtual finance sphere.