Commercial cards are booming. How can banks take advantage?

• Key insight: The commercial card market is expected to double in the next seven years. 
• What's at stake: Fintechs are making inroads, putting banks on the defensive. 
• Forward look: Payment experts suggest banks refocus their marketing strategy to reach small business clients. 

Banks face significant challenges in building their commercial card portfolios, including fierce competition and difficulties in reaching small businesses. 

This is true, even as the corporate card market, valued at approximately $150 billion in 2025, is projected to nearly double by 2033, according to a report from Data Insights Market.

Capital One's acquisition of Brex, which closed in April, underscores the competitive landscape in commercial card programs. Before the deal was announced, banks didn't necessarily notice how many commercial card customers were leaving and how much revenue they were losing, Malte Rau, chief executive and co-founder of Pliant, a fintech focused on B2B payment solutions, told American Banker. But the deal woke them up. "If you don't take a fintech seriously as a competitor, you will take it seriously when someone you consider an actual competitor buys it," he said.

Banks' challenges are particularly evident in the small business card market, according to Nick Maynard, vice president of fintech market research at Juniper Research. 

Small business owners often tend to use personal cards for expenses, rather than using a dedicated corporate card, so banks are not only competing with other business banking solutions, they are also competing with personal banking ones. "Fundamentally, banks have also had fairly basic strategies towards businesses—they have been outmaneuvered by fintechs that offer additional tools like expenses management," Maynard wrote in an email. 

The upshot: Banks need to strategically identify segments where they have good product-market fit, and target these in a more deliberate way. "Banks are in catch-up mode," Maynard wrote.

Re-examine functionality

The competitive gap is no longer just about rewards or user experience, but about integrations, automation, and financial workflows surrounding the card, according to Pliant's Rau. For example, Rau sees banks prioritizing mobile experiences that go beyond simple interfaces and enable real work to be done, such as capturing receipts at the point of spend and reducing manual administrative tasks. Related to this, they are introducing more robust self-service controls, allowing businesses to set card limits, approval flows, and spending policies without relying on manual intervention. 

Automation is also becoming a focal point, particularly in areas like receipt matching, tax handling, and pre-accounting processes, where efficiency gains can be significant. At the same time, deeper integrations with systems such as enterprise resource planning systems, accounting platforms, and HR tools are becoming essential, as customers expect their card programs to connect seamlessly with the rest of their financial operations, according to Rau.

Banks should focus on features that seek to solve customers' biggest problems. For instance, cash flow is typically the biggest challenge a small business will face, and for start-ups, a lack of managed cash flow can be a common reason for failure, Juniper Research's Maynard told American Banker. By having access to simple tools that keep track of a business's financial position, small businesses can better manage their cash flow. "Offering this as a value-added service creates a much better reason for small businesses to choose banks, and indeed will unlock much greater efficiency for the businesses themselves. However, these tools must be easy to use and must reduce complexity," he wrote. 

Change the marketing approach

Banks are almost always messaging on the rewards a business can earn or the low rates they'll get, which is important. "But it ignores the operational half of the equation," which is equally if not more important to small businesses," Ian Benton, senior analyst in the digital banking practice at Javelin Strategy & Research, told American Banker.

Notably, 46% of business cardholders polled by Javelin said that separating business and personal finances effectively was a motivating factor in opening a credit card. Meanwhile, 36% said that gaining access to business-specific rewards was a motivating factor, underscoring where banks could be missing out on opportunities. "I really think it's a positioning issue rather than a feature, functionality issue," Benton said.

Most new business cards are opened by customers with existing relationships, so messaging is especially important. Some fintechs are doing a particularly good job helping small businesses understand the process of building their business credit score, for example. Having a good score can be beneficial when dealing with suppliers and help with business loans. Yet most business owners don't know how to build their business credit and why they even want to, Benton told American Banker. Javelin research shows that 22% of business owners report being wholly unaware of business credit scoring, and 62% do not know their business score. This represents a missed opportunity for banks, he added.

A few banks, including Bank of America and U.S. Bank, have highlighted access to small-business credit scores on their business card webpage. But the messaging is not always front and center, Benton told American Banker. By contrast, fintechs Mercury and Lili both emphasize the ability to build business credit—an innovative way to attract small businesses, Benton added.