The compelling buyer-facing value proposition has led to a significant growth in commercial cards usage. According to a recent projection from Accenture, US commercial card spend alone is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2024, with a forecasted annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12% over the period 2019-2024¹. But the attractiveness of commercial cards to buyers is just one side of the payment ecosystem coin. Achieving the next stage of growth requires addressing the other side: supplier acceptance. This requires developing and delivering a compelling supplier value proposition, which addresses their accounts receivable (AR) needs broadly and payment needs specifically.

Focusing on acceptance now is critical to enable collaborative commerce and fulfil the needs of both buyers and suppliers to fully realize the growth in commercial cards.

Gauging the challenge

We find that suppliers assess cost across two dimensions when accepting commercial cards – operational expenses and fees – and compare this to the value they receive.

In the context of card acceptance, operational expenses are generally driven by increased complexity of managing receivables, and the incremental resource required to process and reconcile payments. First, increased complexity is driven by the need to integrate with multiple AP platforms. Across buyers and their service providers there is a multitude of platforms, each with their own nuances (process, interface). Second, the multi-step process for receiving, retrieving, processing, and reconciling virtual card payments often requires suppliers to deploy incremental resources. Suppliers have shared that virtual card payments can often add upwards of four minutes for each payment processed, thus increasing the total cost of acceptance when processing thousands of payments annually.