Mastercard and NatWest Launch Mobile Virtual Card Partnership

Mastercard and NatWest partnered to introduce a mobile virtual card payment tool for businesses in the United Kingdom.

Approval2Buy is the first service in Europe to use Mastercard’s mobile virtual card app, according to a Tuesday (Nov. 5) news release.

“New payments technology presents new ways for businesses to progress and grow,” NatWest Managing Director for Customer Goals and Journeys Andrew Harrison said in the release. “Virtual cards are a great example. Businesses can now use virtual cards for point-of-sale transactions using mobile phones. This additional feature has generated new use cases. It will also expand the market as it will be useful for contingent labor, temporary employees or where a card is needed for a specific period of time, such as a day, week or month.”

Virtual cards can be generated instantly to use for online and Tap and Go payments via digital wallets, according to the release. Finance teams can use them to customize spending controls while also giving temporary workers, infrequent travelers and recruits a way to pay for corporate travel.

The launch comes as companies in North America are using virtual cards more often. PYMNTS Intelligence’s “2023-2024 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index,” a collaboration with Visa, found that middle-market firms have upped virtual card use by 54% at the expense of other, more traditional forms of working capital.

“I’ve been on the road telling everybody to forget virtual cards as a payment rail — they are actually a working capital rail,” Abhishek, global head of B2B Acceptance at Visa, said in an interview with PYMNTS last week.

Most corporates don’t have the expertise in-house to streamline their payables and receivables and are looking for “integrated solutions that bring this all together in a box,” he said. Virtual cards offer that end-to-end ecosystem.

Meanwhile, Chad Wallace, executive vice president and global head of Commercial Solutions at Mastercard, told PYMNTS in January about virtual cards in the B2B healthcare sector in India.

“By using virtual cards, we’ve been able to speed up the payment process overall between insurance companies and medical providers,” Wallace said.

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