Simplicity, security, and cash-back rebates with no additional overhead.
Virtual cards have been taking accounts payable by storm. Last year, they accounted for $169 billion of B2B spend, an amount that is up 24% from last year. As a result, leading credit card issuers like Visa, Mastercard, and American Express have been investing in their own virtual card payment platforms.
The way that virtual cards work is simple. The process, known as tokenization, sets up each virtual card payment with a randomly-generated credit card number that can be charged one time for one specific amount. MineralTree offers its own virtual card network, called SilverPay, that customers can leverage at no additional cost. The customers that have capitalized on SilverPay have benefitted in a host of ways.
1. SilverPay mitigates your risk of payment fraud
If you’re like the overwhelming majority of middle market businesses today, you are relying heavily on paper checks to make payments. According to the AFP’s annual Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report, paper checks are a fraudster’s target of choice, with 74% of finance professionals reporting that their check payments were exposed to fraud. The reason is simple: checks are incredibly easy to forge. This risk is mitigated through the aforementioned tokenization process that SilverPay employs as payments can only be charged one time and all static credit card information is concealed throughout the entire process.
2. SilverPay improves your command over cash flow
Another downside of paper checks, the leading payment method for middle market businesses, is the time-consuming nature of paying with them. If you want to pay a vendor by check, you are looking at a minimum of one week until that payment is received and processed. This requires extra diligence to ensure you are mailing out payments far enough in advance. With SilverPay, the instantaneous nature of payments enables you to hang on to large sums of money that are due for payment until the day they are due, and also opens up opportunities to cash in on early-pay discounts that previously were very challenging to earn.
3. SilverPay provide cash back rebates
You earn 0.5% cash-back on all payments processed with virtual cards. At this rate, every million dollars that you spend earns you $5,000 back. This may seem like an unimpressive number, but consider one thing: It required almost no effort at all to earn – and it also was easier to make the actual payment itself. As your business – and list of vendors – continues to grow, your rebate total will grow too, and start adding up to a tidy sum to be re-invested into your business.
How To Leverage SilverPay
MineralTree streamlines the process of paying with virtual cards by centralizing the AP process into one cohesive workflow, and offers SilverPay as one of many available payment methods at no additional cost. With MineralTree, the entire process, from the time you receive an invoice to the time you pay that invoice, is accelerated by cutting manual intervention out every possible step. This includes the steps for capturing data on vendor invoices, securing invoice approvals from department heads, getting payment authorizations from executives, and executing the payments. With an implementation process of just a few days, AP automation offers the most viable path to building virtual card payments into your teams B2B payment process.
Curious to learn how you can start leveraging SilverPay? Contact MineralTree for a personalized demo.
