Commercial Cards: Celent Looks at Mobile Payment History
The commercial card might well be one of the earliest examples of non-cash mobile payment platforms. With a history going back 80 years, there have been plenty of changes in the field to consider. A new report from Celent spells out just what’s going on in this field, and what’s likely to change coming up.
Originally, the commercial card started as a means to give airline passengers an option to let travelers be more readily available. With the commercial card, payments could be made a lot faster, and thus generate no ill reflection on the business. After all, no one wanted a reputation as a slow payer; it would be an informal stain if not a formal mark on a credit rating.
New developments in the field have allowed companies to improve the way expenses are managed as well as streamline the whole procurement process. Payables are also sped up, and an overall improvement in cash flow has followed with these improvements.
With these new extras, it’s not much of a surprise that the commercial card industry would expand. Card spending is up just over 900 percent since the 1990s, and that makes it clear that commercial cards aren’t dead, or even close to it. New programs in the field, like analytics and other such matters, are being quickly incorporated.
For a long time, companies were effectively hoarding data; data about their customers, their internal operations, their connections with suppliers and so on. Recently, there’s been a push on to use that data with analytics and similar measures to find patterns, which turn into “actionable insights,” or actions that relate to or otherwise address the patterns found in the data. Since commercial cards have been around so long already, it’s not really a surprise to not only see these get updated with the full range of new financial technologies on hand, but also see these adapted for use in analytics.
One of the earliest mobile payment sources is getting substantially revamped, and illustrates why, even as we look to the future, we always have to keep an eye on our past. Commercial cards are coming forward in a big way, particularly for enterprise users, and will likely continue to be big for some time to come.