KeyBank adds virtual commerce cards to ward off fintechs

• Key insights: KeyBank, with payments fintech Qolo, is launching a new virtual commercial card issuing program.
• What's at stake: Other spend management fintechs such as Ramp, Airwallex and Brex have been making aggressive moves to capture banks' corporate clients.
• Forward look: Banks that do not offer modern card issuing spend controls risk losing their customers to competitors.

Key Bank is turning to virtual commercial cards as it looks to fend off encroaching spend management fintechs looking to nab banks' corporate clients.

The program, called Key Virtual Card, is launching with Qolo, a payments and card issuing infrastructure fintech the bank has been working with since 2024 on ledgering, virtual account management, deposits and infrastructure. KeyBank holds a minority stake in Qolo.

"If you were to rewind the clock and think historically, clients designed business processes around bank offerings," John Withrow, head of commercial cards at KeyBank, told American Banker, citing liquidity, payments and access to credit as common examples of bank offerings.

"In 2026, recent years, and especially moving forward, when you look at enhancements to things like software, workflow automation [and] the momentum that is now falling behind AI, that balance of power has shifted from banks to the businesses who really expect their bank to operate on their terms," Withrow said.

The virtual card issuing platform is an effort by KeyBank to modernize its corporate payments product suite and comes as treasury management fintechs, such as Ramp, Airwallex and Brex — which was acquired by CapitalOne for $5 billion — increasingly offer businesses more control over and transparency around their corporate payments.

"What commercial banks are seeing in general is that there's modern players like Brex, Ramp, Divvy, you name it, that are coming for their commercial card customers," Rouzbeh Rotabi, Qolo's chief operating officer, told American Banker, noting the experience and skill sets of chief financial offers are changing to become more amenable to digital commerce.

"You have younger CFOs. You have digital-first CFOs that want an experience that can be delivered to their commercial card users. And if you don't have that, that's why Brex, Ramp, Divvy — go down the list — that's why they've all grown," Rotabi said.

The virtual card product builds upon KeyBank's virtual account management platform, which is also powered by Qolo, and is designed to help businesses better manage cash and treasury operations by allowing companies to spin up virtual cards with more controls.

For example, a construction company may have multiple job sites across multiple locations that requires both a central and distributed finance structure.

"Those job sites vary in terms of complexity, cost, budget, [and] the operations and the autonomy for those jobs needs to be held at the multiple job sites, but the holding company or the parent company still might need to consolidate aggregate transactions and purchasing, and assign controls at more of a central level," KeyBank's Withrow said.

Similar use cases can be found in other industries, including health care, real estate, manufacturing, and utilities and power, he said.

Marrying modern expense management software with commercial cards is a powerful combination and helps set banks apart from competition, especially ones with larger card portfolios like American Express and Capital One, according to Keefe Bruyette and Woods analysts.

Regional banks know they need modern commercial card platforms to compete, but many lack the investment and agility to build them in-house, Daniela Hawkins, a partner at Capco, told American Banker.

"For banks, it's often a marginal business, while for fintech specialists like Ramp and Brex, it's core to their model," Hawkins said. "Rather than going toe-to-toe, the trend is shifting toward acquisition and partnership — Capital One's move to buy Brex is a clear example. Banks bring the relationships; fintechs bring the innovation."

Other banks and payment companies have been making similar investments in modernizing their commercial payments platform. Amex has plans to add AI into its commercial cards, and Fifth Third's embedded payments business Newline was the bank's fastest growing commercial payments segment last year.

Banks that don't modernize their commercial payments risk losing their customers to competitors, Aaron McPherson, principal at AFM Consulting, told American Banker.

"As businesses get larger, the informal controls that used to work no longer work anymore, and so they need more of a formal approach and more support from their technology provider," McPherson said. "If they don't get it, they'll go to a bank that does provide that right, which may be a bigger bank."

Withrow said that it was essential for a bank to have modern treasury capabilities baked into commercial payment products.

"I see banks caught in between two worlds right now. You've got the history or the legacy, where a commercial client is going, 'Hey, I have a relationship with the bank. I need to go directly to the bank to consume services. I expect the bank to provide all of the solutions that I need to run my business right,'" he said.

"Now that you have AI and workflow applications that are much more software-led over the past few years, and especially going forward, that's where you see companies say, 'The software is critical in terms of how I run my business. I can get the money movement in the bank services from a multitude of providers. It's about who's going to meet me on my terms and put this stuff where I transact and where I run business to make it frictionless for me.'"