JPMorgan and Codat Team to Drive Virtual Card Adoption

Business data API provider Codat and JPMorgan Chase have teamed to promote virtual card adoption.

It’s the thinking behind the launch of Codat’s Supplier Enablement data product. Announced Tuesday (April 16), it lets businesses more easily share their spending and supplier data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and accounting software.

From there, card issuers can access the right data, in their preferred format, in order to recruit suppliers to accept virtual card payments instead of checks, on an ongoing basis.

“Now in production with J.P. Morgan, commercial clients are able to establish and scale programs for paying their suppliers with virtual card by connecting to comprehensive and up-to-date supplier and spend data,” Codat said in a news release provided to PYMNTS,

By swapping static supplier payment files for secure and persistent API connections, the solution offers more robust data sets and complete analysis to banks, which should ultimately lead to an uptick in spend per connected client through its virtual card offering.

“With the rapidly-growing adoption of virtual cards for B2B payments, we felt the time was right to release a new data product specifically designed to transform supplier enablement and accelerate how the value of payments innovation is realized in the market,” said Codat CEO Peter Lord.

Added Stephen Markwell, head of product strategy and FinTech partnerships for J.P. Morgan’s commercial banking unit: “Thanks to our work with Codat, our clients can easily and digitally deliver critical supplier enablement data to our firm, helping to realize efficiency gains and cost savings sooner as well as across a greater share of their spend.”

Past research and reporting by PYMNTS has examined the problems that come with paper check use.

As recently as last summer, that data showed that — in spite of an ongoing shift toward electronic and digital transactions — 62% of businesses were using legacy methods to pay for commercial goods and services.

“While paper checks may seem like a familiar and straightforward payment method, particularly for bigger commercial transactions, the true cost of this antiquated process goes far beyond the price of paper and postage,” PYMNTS wrote in September. “Call it death by a thousand paper cuts.”

More recently, PYMNTS spoke with Andrew Stewart, director of global card and comprehensive payables at Bank of America, about the factors leading companies to shift away from checks and to more modern methods like virtual cards.

These include a labor shortage that has led many firms to adopt technology to help them scale operations while dealing with understaffed accounts payable and receivable departments.