BMO Teams With Extend for Virtual Card Creation

BMO has joined forces with Extend to help clients create virtual cards.

The bank said in a news release Wednesday (Dec. 7) that — via its relationship with Mastercard — its commercial clients would be able to create, send and manage virtual cards from their existing corporate card program using Extend’s mobile and desktop apps.

The partnership arrives ahead of an expected boom in the virtual card industry, with transactions projected to reach the multi-trillion-dollar level in the coming years.

“Too often, teams try to manage and track miscellaneous spend by sharing physical Corporate Cards,” Extend Co-founder and CEO Andrew Jamison said in the release.

“This leads to cumbersome expense reports, manual reconciliation, unattributed spend, or card misuse. By giving BMO’s clients an easy way to extend the features of their existing Corporate Cards, BMO is bringing the future of spend management to business users today.”

Toronto-based BMO says it is the first organization to work with Extend in Canada and will make Extend’s tools available to all of its North American corporate card clients. With Extend, these clients can deploy virtual cards from their card programs in as little as five minutes without technical integration.

As PYMNTS wrote recently, virtual cards are quickly becoming the go-to payment method in a number of markets around the world as businesses go digital. This is down to their ability to help reduce overspending and prevent the mismanagement of funds.

The worldwide value of virtual card transactions is expected to hit $6.8 trillion in 2026, up from $1.9 trillion last year, an indicator of the method’s increasing importance for corporations in the business-to-business (B2B) payment world.

Speaking to PYMNTS last week, Gökhan Nazenin, European vice president of sales for banking and payments at FIS, said much that business will happen in the U.S., as companies try to digitize workflows and automate the paper-based processes all too common in the corporate world.

These cards are also a secure way for buyers to instantly pay suppliers while securing more time to pay outstanding credit card balances, Nazenin explained, adding they also give businesses a means to earn added income with interchange revenue.

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