Zip Adds Virtual Cards to Intake-to-Procure Platform

Zip has added virtual cards to its intake-to-procure platform.

The new Zip Vendor Cards enable businesses to speed up their vendor payments and strengthen their control and visibility into spend, the company said in a Thursday (June 29) press release.

“Zip Vendor Cards, in combination with Intake-to-Procure or Intake-to-Pay, safely accelerates the entire procurement process via flexible intake and approval workflows, so finance teams can spend less time manually processing payments and more time analyzing and optimizing their spend,” Zip Co-founder and CEO Rujul Zaparde said in the release.

Zip Vendor Cards allow finance and accounts payable (AP) teams to facilitate one-off purchases by creating virtual cards with one click and automatically generating cards from workflows based on approval conditions, according to the release.

The new product also works with Zip’s Intake-to-Procure solution to allow these teams to control spending limits and merchant categories, freeze and unfreeze cards, and transfer ownership of cards, the release said.

“Efficiency is essential in today’s economy, yet businesses can’t afford to jeopardize accuracy or compliance for the sake of speed,” Zaparde said in the release. “That’s why we’re making it easy for our customers to streamline their payments processes with our intuitive, highly compliant Vendor Cards solution.”

PYMNTS research found that companies are incorporating virtual cards into their B2B payment processes to improve cash flow, enhance security and enable AP automation more seamlessly than when they rely on paper checks.

Those who have done so have found that virtual cards decrease fraud, improve vendor relationships and provide more insight into companywide spending, according to the “B2B Digital Payments Tracker®,” a PYMNTS and American Express collaboration.

Zip’s launch of its Vendor Cards comes about six weeks after the company added procure-to-pay capabilities to its intake-to-procure platform, creating Intake-to-Pay.

This combination creates a unified platform for procurement that orchestrates spend from initial request to spend approval, payment processing and payouts.

In other news in this space, PayEm said June 21 that it has integrated its global spend management and procurement platform with American Express.

This integration allows American Express Corporate and Business Card Members to use their existing account and PayEm’s platform to create and distribute on-demand virtual cards.

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