The next click in commercial payments may be a tap

LeGrand: It's going to require a big change to introduce a new payment channel within the digital ecosystem. The change means risk, it means complexity with regard to project management and delivery, and it means cost. These three items are top of mind for any C-level stakeholder that you would come across and talk to when it comes to introducing new digital payment capabilities.

Pettican: The first step is understanding where the friction points exist today, whether that's manual processes, limited visibility or a lack of control over spending. From there, organizations need to focus on the solutions that can deliver quick wins while creating a foundation for longer-term transformation. Here’s what’s key: Keeping the end-user experience at the center. Whether it's employees, suppliers or finance teams, digital transformation is most successful when it makes their day-to-day work simpler and more efficient.

LeGrand: You meet a procurement leader, you meet an IT leader, you meet an HR leader, you meet a treasury leader — they're going to think of the cost of change first. But when you elevate the dialogue and take it to the C suite, you start thinking: How is the solution really going to compete against the other payment channels, and how is this going to deliver benefits above and beyond what those existing payment channels offer me? And that's going to be the ability to access enhanced data and the ability to address the tail-end spend, either to finance the supply chain or to unlock cash flow extension opportunities. 

LeGrand: The consumer experience is translating to the world of corporates more and more. The expectation in the consumer world is to be more real time and always on time when it comes to payments. The same should happen in the world of business, where you don't want to have to wait two days or 30 days from the moment you execute a payment requisition to the moment the funds are actually delivered into the supplier's bank account. Whenever it's triggered to be immediate — instant — that’s something that cards can often help with.

Pettican: AI will be transformative, fundamentally redefining what intelligent payments look like, from enhancing fraud protection to simplifying compliance to creating more personalized, intelligent and even automated transactions. Embedded finance is also driving the next wave of B2B payments, moving companies from reactive reconciliation to proactive optimization, making payments smarter, faster and more connected than ever before. 

LeGrand: Wallets are being deployed in all mature markets where they are available by HSBC, and this is really increasing customer satisfaction and their ability also to pay on the go. We've already seen an uptick in utilization, especially in lower-value ticket items.

If you take the example of the London business community, where I am, there has always been a gap between people traveling in the city on business and what was put on expenses on their corporate card. These transactions would traditionally evade the normal procure-to-pay travel and entertainment process. People just like to tap and go, and instead of taking their wallets out, they will use their watches, they will use their smartphones to tap for that business trip that they would typically claim back on the corporate via personal expenses.

Pettican: The recent launch by Mastercard and HSBC of the first mobile virtual corporate card in Hong Kong is another clear sign that consumer experiences and commercial payments are converging. Businesses can instantly issue virtual cards, add them to digital wallets, pay at physical points of sale or online, and benefit from mobile wallet compatibility. This is exactly what we mean by meeting clients where they are. We’re embedding solutions into the platforms and tools corporates already use.

LeGrand: Agentic AI is going to elevate the experience and the velocity at which you can access better security, a better set of information, and how quickly and more easily employees are going to be able to perform typical procurement requests within a procure-to-pay process.

I log on to SAP or Oracle or Coupa, where we’ve already embedded the virtual card technology, and I'm going to start an RFP process. I just feed in the initial technical details, and the agent and AI in the background is going to start looking into how to develop a robust RFP process, start sourcing a select group of potential suppliers, etc.

You can apply that same logic to payments. Going into a booking system and feeding it just your date of travel, the agent will be able to look at your previous travel pattern, the type of restaurants that you've been using, the airlines that you've been using, the hotels that you prefer, and start pulling quotes instead of having you going through it step by step before you make the payment.

Having that on top of just adding your personal card details, whether it is in travel or in procurement, is going to deliver an elevated experience to the user and a much simpler way to source goods and services and to pay for them, in travel as well as in procurement.