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Visa Inc. today introduced Visa Accounts Payable Automation, which helps large and mid-sized businesses to shift costly paper-based payment processes to electronic channels using Visa purchasing cards. The service enables a bank's corporate customers to maintain a Visa purchasing card number on file for automated payments and to easily track remittance information, eliminating the need to reconcile paper invoices with payments initiated through different channels. "The typical Visa corporate purchasing card transaction is around $300 to $400, and with this service we are targeting business-to-business payments from $1,000 to as high as $50,000 that can be made using a Visa purchasing card," Nick Marchetti, Visa's head of global supply chain management, tells CardLine. U.S. Bancorp has been testing the service for the past year with its own corporate customers, and Visa says 10 other banks are testing or are planning to implement the service. Visa Accounts Payable Automation shares some common features with the MasterCard Payment Gateway, a service MasterCard Worldwide introduced last year which Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup Inc. use (CardLine, 10/16). MasterCard touts its e-payments service as a hub for all types of payments, including wire transfers and automated clearinghouse payments, while Visa emphasizes its service's ease of implementation through alliances with global enterprise-system provider Lawson Software and data-integration provider Hubspan Inc. American Express Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. each also offers proprietary versions of centralized e-payment services for corporate customers.
