Conferma Pay and Mastercard have expanded their partnership to enable mobile virtual card payments. Mastercard’s commercial bank clients that are enrolled with select digital wallet providers will now be able to offer the convenience of contactless virtual card payments to their corporate customers using Conferma Pay.    

Leveraging Mastercard’s innovative virtual card solution, which brings together its industry-leading virtual card and tokenization platforms, Conferma Pay will provision Mastercard virtual cards into select mobile wallets. Enabling virtual cards for use in mobile wallets will provide accessible and reliable tap-and-go transactions, and ultimately, a simple, secure and seamless travel payment experience.

Employees will be able to access their company-assigned Mastercard virtual cards on their phones and smart watches to make mobile payments in-app, in-store and online with extra convenience. This allows travellers to pay at hotel checkout using a virtual card, providing a frictionless experience. The ability to use virtual cards for ad-hoc purchases also means business travellers won’t need to rely on covering costs using personal funds and expensing back later.

By connecting into Mastercard’s virtual card application programming interfaces (APIs), issuers can generate virtual cards with more flexible and customizable spend controls aligned with their corporate customers’ travel and expense (T&E) policies. For corporations, this means the actual cost of a trip (i.e. air, hotel, per diems) is captured and applied to the virtual card with a configurable spending limit based on the time period, the amount or even the merchant, providing greater control and oversight on total spending.

The extended collaboration between Conferma Pay and Mastercard will also simplify the reconciliation of hotel expenses. The Conferma Pay Snap+ data enrichment solution eliminates the need for laborious manual processes such as expense submissions and receipt tracking, providing a smoother experience at both point of payment and through ongoing financial management of hotel invoices. Integrating Mastercard’s transaction level reporting within Conferma Pay Snap+ will further enrich hotel folio data for accurate and automated reconciliation, addressing a current industry challenge for hotel invoice data collection.

The launch comes one year on since the announcement of Conferma and Mastercard’s partnership to accelerate the use of virtual cards for business-to-business travel payments.

Jason Lalor, Chief Executive Officer at Conferma Pay, commented, “For far too long, T&E management processes have been fraught with challenges, from poor traveller experiences to manual expense reporting and slow reimbursement processes. The launch of mobile wallet capabilities for Mastercard virtual cards provides choice for issuers to their customers and a simple way for businesses to capture, track and control employee spending. As we progress to a fully digitized payments landscape, increased connectivity and seamless experiences will benefit everyone, from card issuers to employers and their staff.”

Chad Wallace, Global Head of Commercial Solutions at Mastercard comments, “As more corporations seek convenience in managing travel expenses, we’re focused on powering a simple, secure and seamless T&E process. Our partnership with Conferma Pay to simplify hotel reconciliation and enable mobile wallet functionality for virtual cards marks a significant milestone in our journey to improving the business travel experience.”