Name: From Reactive to Proactive: Mastering Spend Control with Virtual Cards and Automation
Uploaded: 2025-04-24T17:46:05.234Z
Duration: 30 min 32 s
Description: From Reactive to Proactive: Mastering Spend Control with Virtual Cards and Automation

Transcript for "From Reactive to Proactive: Mastering Spend Control with Virtual Cards and Automation": Hello, everyone. A really exciting webinar today. So I just wanna make sure we have enough time to go through everything. I'm going to start with housekeeping, though. So, just a few notes before we begin. The webinar is being recorded. You will receive a link twenty four hours after this webinar ends. If you encounter any video or audio lag during this during this live session, there's a button at the bottom. It says light mode. You can just click on that, and you'll still be able to watch the session in real time. It'll just use less of your bandwidth. Other things to note, we have the engagement panel on the right hand side. You will be able to access additional documents that we think are really helpful and useful to further put context to this webinar today. I highly recommend you check that out as well as if you have questions, please feel free to submit them at any time, and that it will be in the q and a tab. I think those are all the main points for today. If you have any questions, like I said, be sure to put those questions in. Oh, lastly, if you would like a follow-up from our team members based on what you heard today, you can click that request a follow-up button at the top. Alright. So hello. Hello. Good morning, afternoon. Whatever it is in your time zone, thank you for joining our webinar today from reactive to proactive, mastering spin control with virtual cards and automation. We have a lot to discuss today. Everything from virtual cards to ad hoc payments and policies, AI, basically anything and everything that pertains to proactively managing your spin and avoiding the pitfall of being reactive. Well, guess what? Now it's time to get started. I'm passing it over to Melissa. Thank you. Thank you, Lauren. My name is Melissa Carroll, and I've been in the payment space for about twenty years now. I started on the merchant side, and then I moved into selling corporate cards, AP automation, b two b payment tools, etcetera. So the whole scope of a of payments. Today, I'm the director of cards at Emburse where I work with companies to take control of their spend with smart, flexible solutions like virtual cards and automation. So today on the agenda, this is basically what we're gonna go through, the opportunity, the power of virtual cards, why now is the time to start using virtual cards, and use cases for virtual cards? Next slide. So I look at this pie chart and the blue pops out to me, and I think it tells a very powerful story. The pie chart is telling you is showing you the payment methods that are taking place today, and it's saying that cards are not just a backup payment anymore. The blue section, which obviously is what pops, is the AP or the vendor spend, and it shows that there is $8,000,000,000,000 of spend a year in The United States on cards. The yellow and the orange are the t and e, and that makes up 600,000,000,000 spent in a year. And the expectation is that the corporate card spend will actually grow by 21% year over year for the next few years. And 20 and 52% of that spend will be virtual cards. That to me, from all my history with being in the payments industry, reflects a major shift in how businesses are managing the spend today. It's faster, more controlled, and far more visible. So now it's I'm just gonna take a quick few minutes to go over the different types of spend here. So now you see three columns, if you will. The first one on the left is the employee spend, and that's the traditional spend. So that's like the teeny type spend, but it could also mean work from home equipment, online courses, or even maybe something like perfect professional memberships. Then we move to the middle spend, which we're calling it operational spend, but it's also our vendor spend as well. It might be subscriptions maybe to Zoom, maybe to Slack, something like that. Could be marketing and advertising. Could be, office supplies like Staples, Uline, Amazon Business, etcetera. So that's taking over a big space of our world today. And then the third one is our AP spend. Our ACP spend is what we're considering more of our invoice spend. So these are typically larger purchases tied to purchase orders and invoices. It's like paying paying for a vendor in, like, bulk order for of materials or services through the AP process. So it's a little more sophisticated, but these are the three types of spends that peep that people today are using with their card. So let's start with the basics. What is a virtual card? We've all heard about it. We we understand physical cards. We've been using them from years, and a virtual card is essentially almost the same thing except without the plastic. It is a unique 16 digit card number generated digitally. So the the physical card is 16 digits, the virtual card is 16 digits. These virtual cards are tied to your company's central account, and you can set controls. You could do spend limits, expiration dates, merchant restrictions, etcetera. It's much more sophisticated and advanced than a physical physical card. How to use them? Just like any other card, quite honestly. You can add them to a digital wall wallet like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and then you can tap it in the stores when you go to the stores. You could also use it online. You, you know, when you go to make a purchase online, we mentioned Amazon business before. If you're paying things online, you can actually use that virtual card right online. So very simple. It's just it's no physical plastic. So now we're gonna start going through the benefits of the virtual card, and we hear these words a lot. Fraud prevention, built in controls, automated reconciliation. But how does it really work and how does it really help? Fraud prevention risk mitigation is to is to protect your card as a whole, and we're gonna put controls in there and then the automation will be the full cycle of the benefits of the card. Virtual cards offer more control, security, and visibility than physical cards physical cards before, during, and after the purchase. So here's some information about the fraud prevention. So when you create these unique card, you can create one for each department, a team, a project, etcetera. You can customize it down to the minutia. So it's very granular. You can do per transaction or vendor. You could preset spend limits, expiration dates, merchant categories, etcetera. Their virtual cards are a very powerful proactive tool for part of it for for for for fraud prevention because these are unique cards just for those departments. And if you ever come across a time when something looks suspicious, you can just deactivate it and replace it instantly with no disruption to your workflow. So I have a story from my past when there was a gentleman that I worked with, and he had gone to it was a hardware store. We'll just say hardware store. Right? So he got to a hardware store. He had to pick up some ad hoc items for the project that that they were working on. So he goes to the store and he makes a bunch of purchases, leaves, finishes the project, goes home, goes back to the office next day, and they find out that someone had taken control of the card, and there was a lot of fraud purchases on it. So what do they have to do? They have to cancel the card. They have to figure out who made the purchases. They have to order a new card. It slowed down his entire process. You can imagine he was not very happy. But what's different with the virtual cards is that we can the virtual cards, you can jump right in and save your workflow, and I'm gonna show you how. This is an example of a typical online platform for a virtual card. It's very clean. It's user friendly. And as you can see, it has all the same data that you would have on a personal card on a physical personal card. The cardholder name, the address, the 16 digits, and all the additional information you would see on a card. But it also has protective controls. As you can see on the left hand side, the speed the spend limit is $5,000. So the company can put a control of $5,000 on that one card, that one virtual card, and it can only be used if you look to the right, it can only be used at a certain store on a between a certain time frame. Here it shows April 2025 to December 2025. So now if your card was compromised, the risk with a virtual card is actually minimal because it could only be be used at one store in a certain time frame with a certain amount of balance available. So now I'm gonna show you piggybacking off the idea that Virgil cards are so simple. So I wanna show you how simple it is to cancel card. It's the same exact screen, but now you hover to the top right with this reddish orange boxes, and there's a drop down menu. It gives you the option to cancel or pause. You could pause a card as well. All you simply do is choose the word cancel, and the card is canceled. It's that simple. So now you no longer have to worry about anybody taking off with the card. You no longer have to worry about additional charges, and then you're protecting yourself. So you're taking a proactive measure here, and this is only possible with virtual cards, not with physical cards. So now you say, alright. So we canceled the card. That was great. But now how do I get a new card? Same idea. Same kinda same screen. Nice, clean, and easy. It's just a little bit of a different section of the screen. You go to the top right. You choose the option for virtual card. You pipe type in the data, the person's name. You put your controls in there. Commit. Submit. You have a card. Now your team is ready to go with the card and no disruption to your workflow. Simple. Right? Now we're gonna talk a little bit about AI generated receipts. If any of you have been on LinkedIn lately, and I have, I am sure you have seen the controversial topic of fake receipts. It's all over LinkedIn. Right? We're seeing a rise in these, and they look real from what I've seen. Employees can now make these fake receipts within seconds, and the tools are free to do this. Right? So we, as a company, wanna protect ourselves. This makes traditional traditional methods of reviewing receipts much more difficult and much less reliable. But as we've been discussing all day, it's not about catching fraud after the fact. It's about preventing it upfront. By using a virtual card with merchant controls, spend limits, and all the data that we just discussed, we eliminate the need to trust and verify after the fact. The guardrails are built in upfront so we can rest at night, know that the cards are gonna work fine. Piggybacking on the built in controls because that's one of the great things about a virtual card is the controls. It ties back into the fraud protection, the controls, automation, etcetera. When you issue virtual cards with built in rules that align with your policies, makes everybody satisfied. Your employee feels more in control. You feel more in control. It's a win win across the board. You can issue a virtual card with preset rules that align with your company's policies. That makes life so much easier again upfront. By adding these controls, it means spend is controlled before it happens, not after. And, again, that's kind of the that's the whole focus of the webinar is how to protect upfront to be proactive, not reactive. And it's a game changer for both compliance and operational efficiency. So you saw the screens before about how simple it was to go on and view the the transactions of a virtual card. This screen very simply shows you and this is pretty much every time you create a virtual card no matter what platform you're on. This pretty much shows you how simple it is to create a virtual card, a name, an address. You could put a budget. You could put you could see on there the advanced controls. There's a time frame, what it's for, expiration date, etcetera. It's so simple and it's so clean. The third area of the benefits of the virtual cards was automated reconciliation. With traditional corporate cards, reconciliation, as we mentioned before, rec just like before, reconciliation is really a reactive response. You're often piecing together the why behind why somebody made the purchases. Right? I submit my expense report, then my boss is like, what was that for exactly if I didn't have the receipt or something is missing? But with virtual cards, that's not the case. You're building that upfront. For each card, you have a specific purchase which allows the transactions to flow smoothly into your expense system with the right coding. No guesswork. No delays. Easier for everyone. Manual reconciliation, as we mentioned before, is time consuming. As you could see in this timeline, from date from the beginning of the process to the end is forty five days. You have the card, finance receives receives a statement, chasing down for all my years when in corporate card, the biggest setback or the biggest time consuming and inconvenience for the finance folks were chasing down receipts. Then here in around day 30 to 40, we're saying investigate discrepancies. You have to recheck everything, and then forty five days closing out the books. That's a long time. It's 2025, and that's a long time for a process. Now reconciliation can happen in days and not weeks. As you can see here, we're saying that when you precode everything and you have everything tied to your policies, everything can be finalized in three days. Employee has a virtual card. Employee makes the purchase. It's brought right into the our expense system. Reconciliation is attached to the individual rec transaction. Transactions approved. And then day three, transaction automatically syncs to your ERP system. Can't beat that. It's fast as can be. So now we ask where can I create a virtual card? Where can I get a virtual card? Not all banks have or not all financial solutions support the virtual card functionality. You need a card issuer or some type of management platform that ties with your card program that offers the virtual card capabilities. With Emburse, our virtual card capabilities are robust. Obviously, the Emburse card program offers virtual cards. It's probably our primary focus. We we create more virtual cards than we do plastic, quite honestly. And Burse also has exclusive relationships with American Express and Silicon Valley Bank. So where they can come through our system, create virtual cards, reconcile the cards, etcetera. We also have some exciting things coming down the line with our merchant with our Mastercard relationship. Not going I'm not going to get into that right now, but there's some exciting things coming down the road. So anytime if you have a merch Mastercard, keep that in mind, and we can definitely have an in-depth conversation. So we're just gonna quickly tap into why Emburse cards. So first, I wanna I wanna say that the Emburse cards are extremely robust, and they're very versatile. So when you compare an Emburse card to a traditional card program, it's kinda like night and day. Traditional cards created years ago, they are maybe tied to a financial institution. They don't have the capabilities to put individual controls on it. Whereas, Emburse card, you could do a daily control amount, transaction amount, merchant category, budgets for card, etcetera. You could see there all the check marks under Emirates cards, so great success. That being said, I also wanna point out that while our wallet cards are fantastic, we do also work with our customers and they main maintain their traditional card program. So if you have a card program and you're happy with it, we say keep that program. We can fill a void or another area of your business that you need these additional controls. So it doesn't have to be one or the other. It's a complimentary program it's complimentary in the sense that we can work together and fill all of your needs. You don't need to have one program that doesn't fill all your needs. You can have two programs to cover everything. So I hope that's helped you today get into a little bit of the information about why the virtual cards are so powerful. As a reminder, it's the fraud, it's the control, and it's the automation. So thank you for listening, and I think we have might have some questions or Lauren will be jumping back on. And I'm back. Hello, everyone. We have tons of questions that have come through. And let me just quickly address, some general ones. So Stephanie had some really great questions in general. So just reiterate, we will send the recording twenty four hours after this session so you can definitely review this and get more more information. Also, I wanted to let you know, that Melissa will be at Emburse in Motion as well, and she will have a card session on the last day. So if you have additional questions, you can ask her in person. But, also, definitely ask us questions right now. We've got several that have come in, so let's start going through them. I'm gonna share them on screen just so you can see them too. Does the reconciliation incorporate the physical receipt being loaded? So the great thing about the virtual cards is that if they're precoded, you actually don't need the physical receipt, but the reconciliation can incorporate the physical receipt. It's we have a couple different expense solutions where we can make this work, So it's kind of a loaded question, but we can if you want to connect offline, we can dig into that much deeper if you want. Cool. Alright. Let's see. Next one. Can you share how you've successfully onboarded employees into using virtual cards? And then question about some stubborn employees. So I'm sure we definitely have some. We sure do. So I think I mentioned before, probably mid mid I don't know the statistic, but majority of our cards are virtual because what my client what I'm seeing with the clients that they they enjoy doing is they like the coding on it. So what they like about the coding is they can put us the example I used before about the hardware store, you could take a card and code it specifically to x y z hardware store and limit the spend. Now the I don't know if your question is asking, are folks comfortable using virtual cards? They can put the virtual card right into their Apple Pay or the Google Pay, and then they could tap it when they get to the point of sale point of sale if it's more of a teeny type purchase. I'm seeing the question to us kind of being like, if you have some more customer success stories, which I know you definitely do about getting, you know, having cards onboarded and then actually getting the employees to use them. So the virtual cards work just like the physical card. So we have a client that all of their their entire program, and they probably have hundreds of virtual cards. Their entire program is virtual cards. And what they did is they put them into sections like, departments. So it wasn't a it's not an academic or an education platform, but they did different categories like a marketing department and IT department, and they were able to create hundreds of cards, not one single physical card. Cool. Alright. Let's do another one. If employees have multiple allocations that need to be coded, how is that done upfront? So they so as we as I was showing you before, when you create the virtual card, you can create the virtual card and you can do a dual code. So you could you could put the coding into it to accommodate that specific need. Because the the coding is very granular, so you can make it very specific. And if you if I mean, you could do two virtual cards, but for the most part, you can create the one card and accommodate all those needs. Cool. Alright. Let's keep this moving. Will we eventually get to choose which card is issued to us? No. We will no. Well, the answer is no, but yes. So if it's an Emburse card, it will be Mastercard. But if you choose to go the American Express route, you can. And American Express program comes in through our Emburse spend tool. So you can continue with your Amex card, or you would have to choose it would or it would be a Mastercard if you're an Emburse card program. Let's see. Alright. How do virtual cards work at hotels? So there's a couple different ways that you can use them. So, essentially, we saw there was a slide before of a woman with her phone. She had it in Apple Pay so she can bring it over and she can share it with them. You could put it into your wallet so it kinda even though you don't have the physical card so they can't swipe it, you still have all the numbers on your phone so you can transfer it over. Some folks work with a management company, and they use the virtual card, you know, a TMC. So there's different ways to use it, but, essentially, as a traveler, you can put it right in your phone. And do you have time just in general for or actually, wait. Got another question. How do you use virtual cards for booking hotels? So when you create the virtual cards and if you're booking the hotel online so there's a couple different ways to book a hotel. Right? So if you're just if I'm an employee and I need to book a hotel, I literally create the virtual card, has the 16 digit code, you put it into the system, you have the expiration date, you have the security code, you submit it. The folks on the receiving the merchant on the receiving end does not know that it's a virtual card. So it processes it the same way as a physical card. Let's see. I mean, this kind of falls on the same. So we have a lot of questions in general is what I'm noticing about, hotels and using the virtual card versus having the traditional plastic. So I don't know. Is there any other things you wanna talk about related to that? That seems to be, like, multiple questions kind of related to that in general. I know in the past, they do like the whole swiping thing, but are we seeing a lot more just in general where virtual cards will accept Apple Pay, kinda like what you're saying before? Yeah. It's the the they're the hotels are evolving now because, I mean, I just went to a hotel last weekend, and I had to check-in. And I actually had, my card in my wallet, my virtual wallet, not my actual wallet, and was able to show them, and they were able to swipe because their point of sale was upgraded to the swiping capacity capabilities. So it went smoothly, and it really it was not a problem whatsoever. I mean, it it's kind of it's really becoming the way of the future. And if in the opening, I had mentioned that corporate cards for 52% of them are gonna be virtual. This year, they're expecting, which based on $8,000,000,000,000 of spend is a lot of spend. So we we're realizing that the merchants on the back end are accommodating these virtual cars. Cool. And I see one more question, and there's two comments that I'll just share based on the hotels. Actually, I'll just share those quickly just because, you know, we were talking, like I said, a lot about it. It's huge. So they were reiterating what I was saying because hotels are way beyond technology. I just thought that was an interesting comment. And then also, so Olga's using virtual cards for travel booking system. So that's really cool. They are doing great. And then I see two more actually really good questions. So I wanna get to those. So what are your fraudulent charge protections with Emburse cards? So we are a Mastercard, and we go through Stripe. So we we we we should go we could do this a little bit more one off, but we do have fraud protection if it's a legitimate fraud protection. The thing about cards, whether it's Visa, Mastercard, American Express, etcetera, is that you just have to make sure you're taking the proper steps to protect yourself. So if you lose your card and then you call us three weeks later, that seems negligent in a sense. Right? So what we ask of you is that if you recognize a fraudulent charge, you immediately reach out to us, and we review it just like any other Visa, Mastercard, American Express type program. If it is a legitimate fraud program for a charge, then we take it off of your statement. Cool. And then I'm seeing this one. Are the virtual cards available for global use? The answer is yes, with to Mastercard. Assuming if you're based in The US, it's a master it's a Mastercard, and it can be used anywhere that Mastercard is accepted, and that includes the virtual and or plastic transactions. Alright. Well, I'm not seeing any. I'll do this little last note. Getting the staff to know it's fraudulent charges on time is near impossible. So that's where we hope that, you took a lot away from what we were discussing today as well as if you are attending EIM, you'll be able to watch that session. We are planning on releasing that session too after Emburse Motion, so you will be able to see it as well. We hope that we really were able to answer your questions. If you have any additional questions, you can reach out to us at any time. I'm customermarketing@imburse.com, one word. You can, and then we will respond to any other questions we missed out, but I think we hit all of the questions in this webinar. Also, be sure we do have a really good case study, in the document section, so be sure to download that as well as any additional, blogs and ebooks about, like, how to use e cards and those processes. We really hope you found this session great. Like I said, we'll send the recording in twenty four hours, and let us know if we have any other questions. Thank you, Melissa. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Have a great day.