Bank of America Offers Businesses More Mobile Payment Options
Recently, we’ve heard how banks are making a greater push on the business-to-business market, and there’s good reason for that. With most of the businesses in America being small businesses, offering them some special goodies helps improve the chances of getting their business in general. Now, Bank of America is offering up a new mobile wallet tool for use with its line of business credit cards to give small business—or any other size—a little extra reason to join in.
The biggest reason behind the push, according to Bank of America, was that business travelers increasingly desired commercial credit cards that would actually work with mobile payments tools like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay. Apparently, because reasons, Bank of America credit cards wouldn’t work with mobile payments systems that have existed for nearly half a decade.
Such a move also lends extra security to the end user; mobile wallets can add an extra layer of security by tokenizing the account number, effectively turning a physical card into a virtual one for temporary use in purchasing. That’s good news for anyone concerned about data breaches, which is most people who use cards to shop in online or brick-and-mortar stores.
It’s a great move, and it’s actually building on some earlier efforts from Bank of America to incorporate mobile. Just a couple months ago, Bank of America announced that its corporate prepaid cards would work with a new mobile app, one that allowed users access to a range of functions from viewing balances and transactions to disabling a card remotely.
Bank of America’s head of financing and channels in global transaction banking Hubert J.P. Jolly noted “Cardholders will no longer have to search for their physical wallet for every business purchase. The result should be faster transactions and greater peace of the mind for the cardholder.”
Jolly is likely correct here, but what makes a person wonder is why in the world Bank of America took this long to get it in place. It might have been it was developing its own product line, rather than piggybacking on established products with other companies. It might subsequently have seen just what it takes to develop these kinds of apps and, by then, the market was established. It might have wildly underestimated how popular these systems would ultimately turn out to be, then jumped on the bandwagon after a lot of customers threatened to jump ship if something weren’t done.
There are a lot of possibilities, but they really no longer matter. Bank of America has made the move, and now its customers get access to a service they greatly desire.