Visa has launched a collaboration with SAP-owned working capital management solutions provider Taulia.
The partnership, announced Tuesday (March 12), brings together Visa’s digital payments technology and Taulia Virtual Cards, a solution that integrates with SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) offerings and business applications.
“Visa and Taulia’s partnership will simplify payments across the business ecosystem by enabling virtual payment credentials to work natively across SAP business applications,” the companies said in a news release. “Through the planned integration, Visa’s APIs will embed virtual payment credentials, acceptance and enablement solutions directly into SAP business applications.”
The release noted that corporate buyers are using embedded virtual cards to streamline the payment experience, letting users remain in their ERP or business applications. The companies said their solution will help finance chiefs, procurement departments and accounts payable teams automate payments to suppliers.
This is “especially helpful for paying one-time suppliers as this eliminates the need to create full master data in the system, a process that can take weeks or even months,” the release said.
The Visa/Taulia team-up follows a similar partnership from last November involving Taulia and Mastercard. It’s also happening as companies are employing working capital management strategies that leverage commercial and virtual cards to manage their B2B spending and make sure they have cash to handle unforeseen expenses.
“Even firms in traditional industries like the transportation and logistics sector, where lockboxes and paper checks abound, are revisiting commercial cards as a versatile tool for managing various aspects of their operations and employee spend,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this week.
This transition is being sped by the commercial landscape shifting toward a more equitable sharing of credit card transaction costs. In the past, sellers bore the brunt of these costs, but the value proposition for each party involved in a B2B card transaction is being continually reassessed, that report said.
Meanwhile, working capital continues to grow more and more scarce for businesses, according to the latest edition of the Federal Reserve Beige Book survey.
“Banking contacts also indicated that credit standards tightened, particularly for business loans and commercial mortgages,” the survey said. “While deposit rates held steady, loan spreads narrowed, and delinquencies continued to rise. Banks and business clients agreed that higher interest rates had lowered demand for loans, while tighter access to credit had lowered the potential supply.”
PYMNTS Intelligence research, meanwhile, has found that less than half of firms with up to $10 million in annual revenues say they had access to business or personal financing.
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Chinese hacking group Silk Typhoon is reportedly believed to have been behind the December hack of the U.S. Treasury Department.
Silk Typhoon is believed to have stolen a digital key from a third-party service provider and used it to access unclassified information, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (Jan. 8), citing unnamed sources.
During the incident, the hackers accessed documents stored on laptops and desktop computers, according to the report.
It was reported Dec. 30 that the Treasury Department workstations were breached by China-backed hackers earlier that month, that there was no evidence that the hacker still had access to Treasury systems or information, and that the department was working to assess the impact of the attack with the help of the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
In another, separate case, the U.S. State Department said Jan. 3 that the U.S. imposed sanctions on Beijing-based cybersecurity company Integrity Technology Group, which is a People’s Republic of China (PRC) government contractor, saying the company was involved in malicious botnet operations targeting U.S. victims.
In that case, PRC-based hackers known as Flax Typhoon were working for Integrity Tech when they targeted critical infrastructure in the U.S. and overseas, the State Department said.
In October, it was reported that U.S. government agencies and some companies had begun investigating the possibility that Chinese hackers targeted American telecommunications companies.
U.S. cyber officials have said that by burrowing into America’s critical infrastructure, Chinese hackers aim to disrupt critical services to hinder a U.S. military response during any future crisis.
Some of the most sophisticated and damaging cyberattacks in history took place in 2024, PYMNTS reported Dec. 27. The attacks ranged from ransomware that crippled critical infrastructure to data breaches that compromised millions of user records.
Eighty-two percent of eCommerce merchants suffered cyberattacks or data breaches in the past year, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and Nuvei collaboration, “Fraud Management in Online Transactions.”
The report also found that 47% of the businesses had lost both revenue and customers due to fraud in the previous 12 months, while 68% saw a drop in customer satisfaction that they attributed to security breaches.