Might mobile payments help revolutionize corporate cards?  David Wood, director of products at Conferma Pay, told PYMNTS in a recent Masterclass that mobile payments are increasingly becoming an essential component of the business payments landscape, providing a “consumersation” experience for business essentials, and will inevitably lead to a change in the corporate card environment. It’s been well documented how reliant on paper checks B2B payments have been right up to and even into the pandemic —

The B2B payments industry is witnessing a shift in mindset amongst corporate buyers and their supply chains. Whilst this transformation has undoubtedly accelerated because of COVID-19, in my experience the pandemic is not the only catalyst. Late payments has always been one way for buyers to preserve working capital but of late – no pun intended – the practice has become far more pronounced.  Does it help anyone? Perhaps not! Every buyer is a supplier

There are hidden costs in accounts payable processes undertaken through traditional means – and some of those costs are not necessarily transparent. As Nick Reid, director of B2B partner development at Conferma, said in an interview with PYMNTS, virtual cards can help eliminate those hidden costs. Reid noted that, although there are no upfront fees for making payments by checks, there are glaring inefficiencies tied to payments made by paper means.  Fully loaded costs of

Since its introduction in 2017, the Conferma Pay Connect service has helped virtual payment shed its out-dated reliance on fax, making secure email communication widely available and encrypted API connection easily accessible. It now communicates virtual card details to over 50,000 suppliers globally, sending over 65% of payment communications electronically. In today’s digital world, reliance on electronic processes has never been more important.  New to Conferma Pay Connect? Learn more here.   About Conferma Pay Conferma

Virtual commercial cards have never been more necessary than today. Remote workers are turning to personal cards to pay for corporate expenses, buyers and suppliers need more efficient ways to pay and get paid, and businesses need immediate visibility into their company spend to improve cash flow and mitigate risk efficiently. Visa Commercial Pay provides comprehensive card-program management capabilities, including on-demand virtual card issuance to employees’ mobile devices via an app, created exclusively by Conferma

This week we saw significant developments on the vaccine front that have implications not just for us personally but for businesses too. News of the vaccine clearly put new momentum into travel and hospitality stocks with some seeing as much as a 40% uplift in a day. Could this be the turning point towards a rebounding global recovery? Should hospitality and travel businesses start preparing for a return to normalcy in the very near term?

In B2B, it’s approaching “ditch the plastic” time. In an interview with PYMNTS, Stuart Davenport, chief innovations officer at Conferma Pay, said that innovation in consumer payments has given some tailwind to the digitization of commercial payments – and the adoption of virtual cards. At a high level, he told PYMNTS, “certainly for consumers at the moment, there’s a rapid recognition of how payments can be made easier and a lot more efficient than they have been

Conferma Pay, a member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced that it has achieved Oracle Validated Integration with Oracle Hospitality Hotel Expertise for its integration of Conferma Pay Connect with Oracle Hospitality OPERA, delivering a secure and seamless check-in and check-out experience for hotel guests. Expertise is a core tenet of the modernized Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) program and allows Oracle partners to highlight their capabilities in a focused area. Ultimately, Expertise is designed to make

This year many finance and procurement teams have gone from thinking about how to make improvements to their existing payment processes to identifying and adopting new payment methods all together. Legacy systems that are paper-based, or rely on traditional rails are as vulnerable as any other physical process during a crisis, and are just not sustainable anymore. The payments landscape is seeing a growing demand for real-time flows and greater control while enabling decentralisation of

Your morning started with live indoor cycling with your favorite instructor on a Peloton bike. You are listening to the Tim Ferriss Show while preparing breakfast, and you just made a Nescafe Espresso as Amazon Prime renewed your monthly capsule order. The kids are e-learning next door. The grocery delivery service is scheduled to arrive this afternoon, just before the online cooking experience and wine tasting you are doing together with your partner. All payments

In the bid to modernize B2B payments, accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) need to work together. To that end, one goal is to integrate payments, streamlining discrete functions of paying vendors and receiving payments from buyers across companies. It’s important to go about breaking down silos within companies, too, where AP and AR once functioned as separate departments without clear lines of communication. With the pandemic, there’s an elevated need for firms to have a more

One of the opportunities has been a new push for a touchless travel experience as businesses recognize their Duty of Care requirements to provide employees with “safe” travel in the new age of business travel. Enter virtual cards. Virtual cards are an exciting step toward smart corporate spending. By removing the traditional plastic card from the equation, business travel expenses are automatically reconciled and the total trip cost is captured in one place. In 2017,

  It may be hard to remember, but when 2020 dawned, unemployment was near historic lows, at about 3.6 percent. GDP was growing at a healthy clip, and most companies — large and small — saw the trends of top-line and bottom-line growth as setto continue. Barely a few weeks into the year, the novel coronavirus seemed a distant concept, isolated to Asia and limited in scope. Then, all too quickly, everything changed, and the

As news comes that United Airlines scrapped the $200 charge to change a ticket for domestic travel, it is becoming clear that to restore travel confidence, flexibility around all aspects of travel management, including how payments are made is a necessity. We have never been in a situation before where the value of refunds is greater than incoming revenue. Airlines, TMC’s, as well as their corporate clients are now looking for more efficient payment processes.

    While the coronavirus has impacted business travel, the use of virtual cards for other B2B spending has actually been soaring, Thompson said. There’s been a “solid realization among corporates” that nearly all corporate transactions — from massive supplier payments to incidental coffee purchases — have common features, he noted. And this has become all the more apparent in the era of COVID-19, he said, as employees are increasingly relocating away from their centralized office buildings and into

    This is a far different experience for everyday business purchases. When individuals pay for work purchases using legacy paper methods, they know they need to pay now, and fill out their expense reports later. Then, if they are able to collect and save their paper receipts, they can eventually get reimbursed for expenses. This manual system has been a source of frustration for both workers and their employers for years, but the pandemic

As the manager of California’s travel program, Bill Amaral’s oversight extends beyond typical business travelers to include all sorts of government workers. During the pandemic, that has meant helping to move around health professionals and other essential personnel. An original impetus behind the state’s virtual payment program was avoiding concerns about travelers’ limited credit on personal credit cards. Now, credit on corporate cards also may be inadequate “as a result of Covid,” said Amaral. The

As the world comes to increasingly rely on digital commerce, it is no surprise to see an increase in security breaches, where attackers manage to gain access to individual or employee information and payment details. This is a sharp reminder of the vulnerability that traditional payment processes expose us to. With governments and public sector organisations becoming large spenders as part of a wider drive to recover from the recessionary phase and also taking over

This week Facebook intensified its push into eCommerce as the demand for online shopping is continually growing. With Venmo, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Facebook Pay – there’s really no shortage of ways to pay online or give people money via your phone. It`s endlessly fascinating to witness the innovation that the social networks and tech companies are bringing to the table. With the staggering growth of online shopping amid the coronavirus pandemic, organisations

Optimism continues to dwindle for the globe’s corporate travel sector, with industry heavyweights expecting business trips to remain on pause for at least the rest of the year — and some anticipating permanent changes to businesses’ travel and entertainment (T&E) spend. But just because corporate travel is on hold doesn’t mean enterprise spending is.   In a recent conversation with Karen Webster, Conferma Pay CEO Simon Barker described some of the biggest impacts of the pandemic on corporate spend,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5VP7sQ290A The confidence of both travellers and their employers to return to travel depends on proactively managing the degree of acceptable risk and demonstrably reassuring individuals that it is safe to travel. A reliable contingency service agreed between TMCs and their clients in advance is crucial. With the number of travellers passing through airport security checkpoints fluctuating as quarantines start to ease, a lot of us are still reluctant to make business travel plans. A