But as recent quarterly earnings and marketplace announcements across the financial sector reveal, the barrier to entry for treasury innovation is increasingly lowering. It’s no longer just the J.P. Morgans and Citigroups of the world that are targeting the enterprise back office as a key business line. A host of smaller and regional lenders are launching new treasury management products and real-time platforms to help their business clients modernize their payment processes and expedite real-time money movement.

On Wednesday (April 29), PNC launched a new payment-focused treasury management product, while a few days earlier on April 23 Regions Bank announced a digital treasury management solution designed to help its clients move away from older, manual and time-consuming processes that include paper documents and physical checks.

Elsewhere, on Tuesday (April 28), treasury solutions provider Qolo launched an expanded partnership with KeyBank that includes a virtual commercial card program designed to help businesses more easily monitor and handle payments.

In earnings calls, banking executives increasingly framed these investments not as cost centers but as growth engines, underscoring that it is no longer just the biggest banks out there that are capable of building more stable and diversified businesses.

And smaller lenders are already seeing the benefits of expanding their offerings into the office of the CFO. The KBW Nasdaq Regional Banking Index, which tracks banks with assets under $100 billion, has returned around 24% year-to-date.

Read more: Treasury Teams Shift to Mobile Platforms to Manage Real-Time Cash

Smaller Banks Embrace Strategic Pivot Toward the Back Office

Treasury management, traditionally associated with cash positioning, liquidity forecasting and payment orchestration, is evolving into a high-value service line. For large banks, it has long been a cornerstone of corporate banking. BMO, for example, on Monday (April 27) debuted a business banking and treasury management platform for small- to mid-sized businesses and emerging middle market customers.

For smaller lenders, however, the economics of treasury management historically didn’t justify the investment in infrastructure and talent.

That calculus is now changing. Earnings reports from regional banks across the Midwest and Southeast show growing non-interest income tied to treasury services, with executives highlighting new product rollouts in digital payments, automated receivables and real-time cash visibility tools. Credit unions, too, are entering the conversation, leveraging cooperative structures to fund shared technology platforms.

At the core of this pivot is a recognition that treasury services are sticky. Unlike lending relationships, which can be episodic, treasury management embeds a financial institution into the daily operational workflows of a business. Once integrated, switching providers becomes costly and disruptive, creating a durable revenue stream.

Meanwhile, the rise of FinTech infrastructure providers has lowered the barrier to entry. Companies like FIS, Fiserv and Jack Henry & Associates are enabling smaller institutions to deploy sophisticated treasury capabilities without building them from scratch.

Cloud-native architectures and application programming interface (API)-driven integrations also make it easy for regional lenders to plug into payment rails such as The Clearing House RTP® Network and the FedNow® Service. This access is critical. Real-time payments are no longer a differentiator; they are quickly becoming table stakes for corporate clients seeking to optimize working capital and reduce settlement risk.

The result is a democratization of treasury technology. Smaller banks can now offer services that rival those of global institutions, often with greater customization and responsiveness.

Read also: Can Your Treasury Function Put Money to Work Immediately? 

Why CFOs Are Paying Attention

For corporate finance leaders, the emergence of new treasury providers comes at a moment of heightened complexity. Supply chain disruptions, interest rate volatility and evolving regulatory requirements have placed a premium on liquidity management and cash forecasting.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence in collaboration with Ingo Payments shows that 39% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) function with less than a month’s operating cash at the ready, which makes them highly vulnerable to even slight interruptions to their payment cycles.

“They’re under pressure to move faster, but often their internal tools haven’t kept pace,” Jennifer Sanctis, managing director of CashPro at Bank of America, told PYMNTS about treasury teams, pointing to fragmented systems and delayed insight into cash positions. “Speed without visibility creates risk and visibility without speed creates bottlenecks.”

At the same time, additional data from PYMNTS and Visa research has shown that cash-flow certainty is closely linked to confidence in growth. When finance leaders can trust their liquidity position, they are more willing to invest, extend supplier terms and accelerate payroll or vendor payments without fear of shortfalls.

Without the legacy systems that often constrain larger banks, smaller lenders can iterate more quickly and tailor solutions to specific industries or client segments. In some cases, they are embedding treasury tools directly into accounting platforms, blurring the line between banking and software.

This shift is particularly relevant for middle market companies, which have historically been underserved by large banks yet too complex for basic commercial banking products. For these firms, regional lenders offering advanced treasury services represent a compelling alternative.

There is a number sitting in a spreadsheet somewhere right now. A revenue figure that jumped 10%, or a cost line that crept upward by a fraction, and nobody in the room can say with any certainty why it moved.

This is not a technology failure. It is, arguably, a design flaw that has been baked into financial planning for four decades; one so familiar that most finance professionals have simply stopped noticing it.

Evan Rumpza noticed. And then he decided to do something about it.

Rumpza is the CEO of Galdera Labs, a European startup that has raised 1.5 million euros (about $1.8 million) in seed funding to build what he describes as a “living model.” The tool aims to be a financial planning system that doesn’t just run calculations but holds context, traces decisions and articulates the reasoning behind the numbers in real time. The pitch sounds straightforward. The problem it is solving turns out to be surprisingly deep.

The 90-to-3 Story

The company’s origins trace back to Klarna, the Swedish payments giant that processes transactions for millions of merchants across Europe and beyond. Rumpza and his future co-founders built internal financial systems there that compressed a team of 90 analysts down to three, without sacrificing the quality or accuracy demanded by an organization preparing for an $800 million fundraise and an eventual public offering.

That compression was not achieved by automating the arithmetic. Spreadsheets already handle that. The breakthrough was building systems that could hold the narrative alongside the numbers. Those systems could remember why an assumption changed, who initiated it and how it cascaded through the rest of the model.

“A formula doesn’t tell you why this cell changed,” Rumpza explained during a conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “That context, right now for most organizations, lives in the heads of various stakeholders across the company.”

After watching artificial intelligence (AI) reshape the way Klarna’s engineering teams worked, Rumpza saw the same transformation waiting to happen in finance. The question was how to do it without breaking the one thing finance refuses to compromise on: accuracy.

The Accuracy Problem

Webster put the constraint plainly during their conversation. “You can’t just be 90% right,” she said. “You have to be 100% right because so many decisions hinge on the accuracy of that workflow.”

Rumpza’s answer is not to make AI more accurate at math. It is to stop asking AI to do math at all.

Galdera’s architecture keeps deterministic computation separate from AI reasoning. The core calculations, the numbers themselves, are handled by traditional systems that produce identical outputs from identical inputs, every time. AI is applied to everything else: navigation, context, interpretation and the translation of numerical outputs into something that can explain itself to a CFO.

Connecting the two is a graph-based data structure that maps the relationships between every assumption, change and outcome in the model. When a number moves, the system can trace exactly why, and surface that trace without anyone having to reconstruct it from memory.

“The math stays deterministic,” Rumpza said. “And then the context and the navigation is where the AI really helps.”

Transparency as the Product

In a technology landscape full of companies promising seamless AI behind polished interfaces, Galdera is taking a deliberately different approach. The company’s go-to-market strategy is built around showing CFOs exactly what is happening inside the system, not abstracting it away.

“It all comes back to simplicity,” Rumpza said. “There’s a lot of jargon in this space … but it’s really keeping everything really simple and also exposing a lot of data to the end user.”

The target audience is finance leaders who are drawn to what AI can offer but unwilling to stake their credibility on a black box. For that audience, a system they can interrogate is worth more than a system that simply projects confidence. The transparency is not a feature; it’s the entire basis of trust.

What the Technology Still Cannot Do

Rumpza is candid about the limits. Large language models, he acknowledged, still struggle with the kind of multi-step, sequenced analytical reasoning that defines serious financial planning. The improvement in mathematical reasoning over the past few years has been real, but the challenge of orchestrating complex workflows that combine structured calculation with contextual judgment remains unsolved.

“It’s still this combination of contextual reasoning with also the deterministic structure,” he said, “where there’s a lot of potential and room to grow.”

This acknowledgment shapes the entire product philosophy. Galdera is not claiming to have replaced financial expertise with machine intelligence. It is claiming to have built a framework that routes each task to whatever handles it best, and that does so transparently enough that the CFO sitting at the other end of the system can follow the logic without having to take anything on faith.

“It’s not so much about competing with the foundation models outright,” Rumpza said, “and more about serving the right context to the user in the right moment.”

The Next Interface

The electronic spreadsheet didn’t just change how finance teams worked. It changed what kind of financial thinking was possible. VisiCalc, released for the Apple II in 1979, was one of the first software applications that could justify buying a personal computer for business. Excel, launched in 1985, effectively defined a generation of corporate decision-making.

What Rumpza is proposing is not a replacement for those tools. It is a new layer above them, one that takes the output of deterministic computation and transforms it into something a CFO can actually use to lead.

For organizations managing rapid expansion across multiple currencies, product lines and regulatory environments, the gap between knowing what happened and understanding why it happened is not a minor inconvenience. It is where decisions get delayed, where assumptions go unchallenged, and where the wrong number becomes the basis for a very consequential choice.

Galdera’s bet is that closing that gap is worth $1.8 million in seed capital, and that the CFOs who have spent years explaining their spreadsheets to each other will recognize, almost immediately, what it means to have a model that can finally explain itself.

PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster is one of the world’s leading experts in payments innovation and the digital economy, advising multinational companies and sitting on boards of emerging AI, healthtech and real-time payments firms, including a non-executive director on the Sezzle board, a publicly traded BNPL provider. She founded PYMNTS.com in 2009, a top media platform covering innovation in payments, commerce and the digital economy. Webster is also the author of the NEXT newsletter and a co-founder of Market Platform Dynamics, specializing in driving and monetizing innovation across industries.

On Wednesday (April 8), for example, Bank of America reported in an interview with PYMNTS that corporate clients using its CashPro mobile app were approving an average of $38,000 in payments every second, with usage climbing 20% year over year.

This transition reflects a broader recalibration of corporate operations. The acceleration of payment rails, the proliferation of instant settlement systems and the growing complexity of global liquidity management have collectively forced treasury teams to operate more like trading desks than accounting departments.

Against this backdrop, the rise of mobile treasury is about survival in a world where delays can exact measurable financial and strategic costs. As decision cycles compress from days to minutes, the ability to approve payments, monitor cash positions and respond to risk events from anywhere becomes not just convenient, but increasingly essential.

Read also: Can Your Treasury Function Put Money to Work Immediately? 

A New Tempo for Corporate Finance

The appeal of mobile in treasury is straightforward: it aligns with the new tempo of financial operations. When liquidity positions can change in real time and high-value payments require immediate authorization, waiting for desktop access introduces friction that organizations can no longer afford.

“They’re under pressure to move faster, but often their internal tools haven’t kept pace,” Jennifer Sanctis, managing director of CashPro at Bank of America, told PYMNTS about treasury teams, pointing to fragmented systems and delayed insight into cash positions. “Speed without visibility creates risk and visibility without speed creates bottlenecks.”

Yet framing mobile as “the future of treasury” may risk oversimplifying a deeper shift. Mobile is not redefining treasury on its own; it is emerging as the most visible surface of a broader re-architecture. The real transformation may lie beneath it in data infrastructure, decision intelligence and control systems.

After all, at its core, modern treasury management depends on four interlocking components: data, intelligence, control and interface.

The data layer aggregates real-time information across accounts, geographies and counterparties, providing a unified view of liquidity. The intelligence layer applies analytics and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI), to forecast cash flows, identify anomalies and recommend actions. The control layer governs permissions, approvals and risk parameters, ensuring that decisions align with policy and compliance requirements.

Finally, the interface layer, where mobile resides, presents this information and enables user interaction.

PYMNTS and Visa research has shown that cash-flow certainty is closely linked to confidence in growth. When finance leaders can trust their liquidity position, they are more willing to invest, extend supplier terms and accelerate payroll or vendor payments without fear of shortfalls.

See also: CFOs Become the Source of Truth as Data Sprawls Across B2B 

The Desk-Free Treasury Function

The phrase “desk-free” has typically been associated with frontline or field-based workers. Its application to treasury underscores how fundamentally the role is evolving. Finance leaders are no longer confined to offices or even fixed working hours. Instead, they are expected to respond to financial events in real time, regardless of location.

In a July interview with PYMNTS, Albert Acevedo, head of banking and treasury services at Priority, described how treasury operations are being reshaped by faster settlement.

“We are definitely seeing an increase in the velocity of both money movement and decision making,” Acevedo told PYMNTS, noting that treasury teams are being forced to operate at the speed of instant commerce.

This shift has practical implications. A CFO traveling across time zones can approve a critical supplier payment instantly rather than waiting for a morning review. A treasury manager can respond to a sudden liquidity need triggered by market movements without logging into a desktop system. The ability to act immediately reduces friction and, more importantly, reduces risk.

But desk-free does not mean less controlled. In fact, the opposite is often true. Mobile treasury platforms are being designed with embedded controls, multi-factor authentication and audit trails that ensure governance standards are maintained even as access becomes more flexible. The challenge is not maintaining control but redefining how control is exercised in an always-on environment.

In the end, the evolution of treasury is less about devices and more about decisions. Mobile may change how those decisions are made, but the future will be determined by who, and what, guides them.

The new Coupa Card is embedded natively within Coupa Pay, enabling organizations to manage supplier payments and employee expenses through the Coupa platform, the company said in a Thursday (Nov. 6) press release.

Coupa Card features enhanced spend control, real-time tracking and security, according to the release.

“Coupa Card is not just another virtual card, given its powerful reach and capability,” Salva Lombardo, chief product and technology officer at Coupa, said in the release. “By embedding it inside our unique end-to-end platform, it is a singular card that can manage spend across the entire [source-to-pay (S2P)] process and will help companies achieve autonomous, frictionless spend and trade within a constantly learning and adapting AI network.”

The card is powered by Brex and will be accepted across Mastercard’s global payment network, per the release.

Brex Chief Business Officer Art Levy said in the release that with Coupa Card, “U.S. customers with global operations can get underwritten and approved in just a few days and issue local cards in 30 currencies across 50 countries.”

Mastercard Global Head of Commercial Verticals Scott Abrahams said in the release that with Mastercard’s capabilities embedded into the Coupa platform, the Coupa Card helps organizations “simplify supplier payments, control spend and unlock working capital with speed, security and scale.”

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Why 2025 Could Be the Year of the Virtual Card” found that virtual cards offer greater efficiency and security than manual payment processes and that these features help mitigate risk and cash flow disruptions arising from traditional B2B payments.

The report also said that three-quarters of chief financial officers at middle-market companies expressed high interest in accepting virtual cards to ensure timely payment.

When Coupa and veterinary care company Bond Vet announced that Bond Vet clinics would employ Coupa’s spend management platform to manage their finances and supplies, the companies said in a press release that this would automate tasks like ordering supplies and managing expenses, “so clinic teams can focus on delivering top-notch care without worrying about running out of important medications and other supplies.”

For all PYMNTS B2B coverage, subscribe to the daily B2B Newsletter.

“Time to Cash: A New Measure of Business Resilience,” a new collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence, Bottomline and FIS, uncovers how CFOs are collapsing payment cycles, automating reconciliation and transforming cash flow from a lagging metric into a leading advantage. Drawing on exclusive survey data and first-hand insights, this report captures how finance leaders are redefining speed as the ultimate measure of resilience.

In this report, learn how:

• CFOs are closing the liquidity gap by using real-time payment rails and digital workflows to cut “time to cash” with 71% of firms seeing cash flow improvements.
• AI-powered forecasting and automation are helping treasury teams unlock trapped working capital and build smarter, faster payment ecosystems.
• Industry leaders across manufacturing, healthcare and tech are re-engineering their financial operations to compete in a 24/7 payments world.

In a business climate where seconds separate winners from laggards, liquidity has become the new frontier of competitive advantage. Don’t wait for tomorrow’s settlement to plan today’s strategy. Download the report now and see how your peers are turning speed into staying power.

Inside “Time to Cash: A New Measure of Business Resilience”

“Time to Cash: A New Measure of Business Resilience,” a new collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence, Bottomline and FIS, is based on a survey of 375 CFOs of U.S. companies with annual revenues in 2024 between $250 million and $2.5 billion. The survey was conducted from July 17, 2025, to Aug. 5, 2025. The report examines the state of cash flow management and the key innovations driving improvements in the space. Our sample contained enterprises across goods and services sectors.

Treasury used to run on lag. Reports rolled in after cutoffs. Cash positions were tallied after the fact. By the time a treasurer got the full picture, reality had already shifted.

For decades, this quiet workhorse of corporate finance was responsible for managing cash, processing payments, and ensuring counterparties get what they’re owed. But in today’s volatile global economy, that image no longer fits. The role of treasury has shifted from operational caretaker to strategic nerve center, with visibility, agility and centralization becoming nonnegotiable priorities.

Across industries, corporate finance teams are plugging into treasury management systems (TMS) that use artificial intelligence (AI), real-time data, and user-friendly integrations to get finance teams going faster.  Far from being static tools for tracking liquidity, modern TMS platforms are becoming intelligent orchestrators of payments and data, enabling treasury teams to anticipate risk, optimize working capital, and make decisions that drive resilience and returns.

When the COVID-19 crisis hit, multinational companies discovered the limits of fragmented cash visibility. Treasury teams scrambled to answer basic questions: How much liquidity do we have? Where is it parked? Which counterparties carry hidden risks? In many cases, siloed systems and manual processes slowed answers to a crawl.

As the ongoing question for today’s treasury teams becomes not whether a next crisis is coming, but when it might hit, firms are increasingly turning to real-time treasury operations as a key enabler of agility and survival.

Read more: Why CFO Now Stands for ‘Chief Forecasting Officer’ 

Orchestration Upgrade Redefines Treasury Management

The transformation of treasury is not just about technology. It is about enabling financial leaders to navigate uncertainty with confidence, agility, and foresight.

“There’s nothing more important to the treasurer than preserving and understanding where their cash is,” Tom Durkin, global product head of CashPro in Global Payments Solutions at Bank of America, told PYMNTS in an interview published Monday (Aug. 4), adding that people traditionally have used a spreadsheet to forecast, and that could take up to a week to complete.

Because what “visibility” means has evolved. Companies increasingly need real-time, enterprise-wide transparency across accounts, geographies and counterparties. With API connections and real-time rails, treasury platforms now plug directly into bank data, trading platforms and ERP systems. The result: a live view of liquidity worldwide.

Treasurers can rebalance funds between subsidiaries at noon, hedge currency exposures on the fly, or reroute payments instantly. 

The most important shift, however, is conceptual. Traditional treasury was about execution, such as moving payments, booking hedges, reconciling accounts. The future more and more looks like it might be about orchestration.

Think of it this way: Instead of simply processing payments, treasury systems can now orchestrate payment flows across multiple banks, currencies and jurisdictions to optimize working capital, reduce fees and minimize risks. Instead of just reporting balances, treasury could be able to dynamically allocate liquidity where it can create the most value. Instead of reacting to disruptions, treasury might be able to anticipate them and adjust strategies in advance.

Read also: Forget the TACO Trade, B2B Firms Are Betting on Time to Cash

Scenario Planning Goes Mainstream

Treasurers live in a world of “what ifs.” What if foreign exchange markets swing? What if a supplier in Asia shuts down? What if inflation spikes in South America?

Modern treasury platforms now let them model all those scenarios and more, on demand. Simulations can run even 12 or 18 months out, testing how shocks in one region ripple across subsidiaries and accounts.

That makes treasury a bigger player in strategy conversations. Instead of just reporting on cash, treasurers can advise CEOs on how different events would hit liquidity and risk. Forecasting has moved from an operational task to a strategic weapon.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Why Treasurers’ Influence Matters” found that treasurers with high levels of influence are more likely to report that their companies have predictable cash flows, expect revenue to increase and are agile in responding to shifting market conditions.

The TMS revolution is about more than convenience. Teams are leaner, workloads are heavier, and CFOs want efficiency. If a task can be automated, it will be. If a request can be digitized, it must be. And if a scenario needs planning, the financial forecasting better be sound.

U.S. Bank Business Essentials, announced Monday (April 14), lets businesses accept card payments with free same-day access to their funds and a free mobile card reader.

The bank said it introduced Business Essentials in response to the needs and demands of small business clients, who are seeking service providers who can bundle their digital banking, payments, and operations tools.

“With Business Essentials, we are making it easier for small business owners to manage their business,” Shruti Patel, chief product officer for the business banking segment at U.S. Bank, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. 

“We are bringing multiple capabilities together — a best-in-class checking account with payments and differentiated easy-to-use software — in a single integrated interface.”

Also Monday, the bank debuted a spend management platform to help businesses track and control card-based spending. This platform is being rolled out across U.S. Bank’s business banking credit card portfolios, giving business owners an alternative to using multiple tools.

“It’s an additive capability on our credit cards that provides our cardholders with the convenience of monitoring, controlling and tracking business spending — while continuing to enjoy the great rewards and benefits already associated with their business credit cards,” said Courtney Kelso, head of the bank’s consumer/small business segment. “With Spend Management, those same cards are an even more enriching tool for operating a business.”

These new product launches are happening at a time when small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are facing increasing financial pressures. One out of every two of these businesses in the U.S. now “rely on their day-to-day sales just to keep the lights on,” PYMNTS wrote last week. “Nearly 1 in 5 are pessimistic about their odds of survival over the next two years. Almost 7% think they might not make it.”

Only 28% of SMBs have business cards, and of that group, 64% of businesses with access to any form of financing turn to their corporate cards to withdraw cash for operations.

Although credit cards potentially carry high interest rates, they “offer a quick and relatively easy way to access funds,” PYMNTS wrote. “At the same time, 4 in 10 businesses with access to financing also rely on their owners’ personal credit cards,” blurring the lines between personal and business finances and potentially putting both at risk.

“This round allows us to scale our AI capabilities and continue transforming how companies manage payments, expenses and travel — helping them operate more efficiently while reducing costs and complexity,” Mendel Co-Founder and Co-CEO Alan Karpovsky said in a Thursday (March 27) press release.

Mendel’s platform integrates expense management, payments and corporate travel; charges recurring software-as-a-service (SaaS) fees; and operates in Mexico and Argentina, according to the release.

With the new capital, the company will expand the platform’s AI-driven spend management capabilities; scale its team in product development, go-to-market execution and AI research; and extend its operations into Chile, Colombia and Peru in 2025 and Brazil in 2026, the release said.

Mendel’s latest funding round was led by Base10 Partners with participation from PayPal Ventures, per the release.

“Mendel is revolutionizing corporate spend management in Latin America by delivering an enterprise-grade, AI-first platform that eliminates inefficiencies and modernizes the financial stack for businesses,” Jason Kong, partner at Base10 Partners, said in the release.

PayPal Ventures Partner Ian Cox said in the release: “Latin America is one of the most dynamic FinTech markets in the world, yet enterprise spend management remains underserved. Mendel’s combination of software-first pricing, deep localization and AI-driven automation makes them uniquely positioned to lead this space.”

Mendel launched its corporate spend management platform in Mexico and raised $35 million in a Series A in 2021 and raised $60 million in another funding round in November 2022. The company said at the time of the second funding round that it was working to accelerate the development of its platform in the Mexican market.

Latin America has emerged as a leader in digital payments in recent years, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and Galileo collaboration, “Promising Payments: Digital Payments Gain Ground in Latin America.”

The report found that the digital banking revolution is reshaping shopping behaviors in the region, with consumers leveraging constant internet connectivity to enhance their purchasing experiences.

In the past week alone, for example, Citigroup had two transactional slipups: one near miss of $81 trillion, and another erroneous copy-paste of around $6 billion; both as a result of human error.

While not a direct parallel to corporate spend management, the incidents at Citi highlight that the control framework around any form of enterprise payment has always necessitated striking a balancing act between oversight and efficiency. It also illustrates the significant risks of human error.

The rise of digital payments, remote work and globalized supply chains has created a complex web of corporate expenditures that demand tighter control. Yet, despite these challenges, many organizations still rely on outdated processes to manage expenses, exposing themselves to inefficiencies, fraud and compliance risks.

Fortunately, as the Wednesday (March 5) announcement that Emirates NBD has become the first bank in the United Arab Emirates to offer Visa’s Commercial Pay Mobile module for its small business and corporate clients shows, businesses are wising up to the benefits of virtual cards and unified expense management platforms in corporate payments.

Read more: How Back-Office Leaders Are Selling the C-Suite on Risk and Compliance

Virtual Cards Are a Modern Solution

Stolen or misused corporate cards can account for a significant portion of business fraud cases, and traditional corporate cards often aggregate multiple expenses, making it difficult to track spending at a granular level.

Underscoring the scale of the threat, payroll and payments platform Papaya Global on Wednesday launched a partnership with verification and compliance solutions provider Sumsub to deploy artificial intelligence (AI)-powered fraud prevention and verification solutions, helping ensure compliant payment transfers for companies and their workers.

“Fraud is growing as fast, or faster, than the pace that the overall B2B market is growing,” Eric Frankovic, general manager of business payments at WEX, told PYMNTS.

This is the backdrop against which virtual cards are emerging as a game-changer in corporate payments. Unlike traditional credit cards, virtual cards are generated digitally and designed for one-time or recurring use with customizable spending limits.

“Virtual card numbers offer a modernized solution with flexibility in transaction amounts, merchant types and frequencies,”  Marcos Gelfi, vice president and global head of commercial fraud/dispute products and cardholder solutions at Discover® Global Network, told PYMNTS.

“By leveraging data and defining clear corporate policies, businesses can achieve greater efficiencies and robust fraud prevention. … The data that you capture is pretty important and can help you negotiate better with suppliers, and help you manage your budget better,” Gelfi explained.

Recent data from the second edition of the “Growth Corporates Working Capital Index” done in collaboration between Visa and PYMNTS Intelligence, has found that virtual cards are being used more often, finding a strong place as a working capital solution, and the use of these cards have grown by nearly a third, year over year.

Many virtual card platforms integrate with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, accounting software, and expense management tools, creating a frictionless financial ecosystem.

Read more: CFOs Embrace Data Clouds Amid Shift Away From Pure-Play Record-Keeping

Power of Unified Expense Management

While virtual cards address a significant piece of the expense management puzzle, they are even more powerful when integrated into a broader, unified expense management solution. These platforms consolidate corporate card transactions, reimbursements, accounts payable, and vendor payments into a single ecosystem, giving businesses a holistic view of their financial operations.

Industries with high volumes of vendor payments, travel expenses, and procurement costs stand to benefit the most from virtual cards and unified solutions.

With real-time visibility, finance teams can now get instant access to spending data, allowing them to make split-second decisions that can mean the difference between profit and peril.

Unified platforms can also automatically enforce company policies, ensuring every dime is accounted for — and that rogue spending is caught before it spirals out of control. Ultimately, with a bird’s-eye view of payables, smarter expense forecasting, and real-time working capital optimization, businesses can keep their cash flowing smoothly and their balance sheets rock-solid.

The new features, announced Thursday (Feb. 13), are aimed at boosting operational efficiency and supplier collaboration and engagement.

“Every product release brings us closer to Coupa’s vision of a fully autonomous spend management future,” Salvatore Lombardo, Coupa’s chief product and technology officer, said in a news release.

“Agentic AI will play a central role in making our collaborative global trade network grow,” he added. “The innovations in our latest release sharpen our direct spend capabilities for customers, improving how both buyers and suppliers connect and collaborate, transact, and grow their business.”

Lombardo added that Coupa has also introduced new offerings for its supply chain design and planning solution, aimed at helping customers analyze scenarios and make faster and better business decisions.

The company’s new agentic artificial intelligence (AI) offerings include contract intelligence, which is designed to “improve contract language analysis and process more contracts with standard and custom field extraction with AI advancements.”

There’s also the “Rapid Network Explorer,” which the company said can accelerate the generation and analysis of supply chain scenarios to help customers eliminate “low-impact scenarios and provide “a significant improvement in scenario run time for modelers to drive fast decision making.” 

The announcement follows a similar product rollout by Coupa in April, which also included 100-plus new features.

PYMNTS spoke recently with Bill Wardwell, general manager at Coupa Pay and Treasury, about the increasing stakes for fraud prevention as digital payments innovation continue. New risks such as fraud and security vulnerabilities, compliance demands, counterparty reliability and payment failures, test consumer trust in the system. 

“These threats aren’t just financial; they strike at the heart of trust,” Wardwell said in an interview for the What’s Next in Payments series, “The Payments Circle of Trust and Risk.” “A single breach can erode years of goodwill, undermining customer confidence and causing significant reputational damage.”

Fraud and security breaches are a persistent threat for the payments industry, made worse by the rapid evolution of cybercrime. Wardwell cited advanced tactics such as business email compromise, cyberattacks and artificial intelligence-driven deepfakes to illustrate the new stable of sophisticated fraud schemes.

“The challenges are formidable, but they also present an opportunity,” PYMNTS wrote. “With the right technologies and strategies, businesses can transform security from a necessary expense into a competitive advantage.”