Mastercard today announced a series of enhancements to Mastercard In Control® – the industry-leading virtual card number (VCN) platform according to Kaiser Associates – reinforcing its position as a global leader in secure, scalable B2B payments. New innovations include advanced virtual card controls that help reduce risk across the full payment lifecycle, and one scalable connection to Mastercard’s growing embedded partner network — enabling enterprises, financial institutions and platforms to manage payments with greater confidence, flexibility and efficiency.
Mastercard’s VCN ecosystem now includes issuers, direct platforms and corporates transacting across 43 countries and territories – including 14 in Asia Pacific – and 174 currencies, underscoring its ability to support global expansion while maintaining consistency and oversight.
“For corporates across Asia Pacific, a region that touches the majority of the world’s largest trade corridors, the pressure isn’t just to digitize payments, it’s to manage supplier relationships and working capital across increasingly complex cross-border operations,” said Anouska Ladds, Executive Vice President, Commercial and New Payment Flows, Asia Pacific, Mastercard. “Virtual cards give finance and procurement teams a way to extend that flexibility without adding risk or friction to the supplier relationship. That’s the outcome corporates in this region are actually optimizing for, and it’s why we see virtual cards becoming an integral part of how businesses pay.”
Delivering a more unified, scalable experience for virtual card programs
Commercial Connect API, the market’s only single‑API front door according to Kaiser Associates, is simplifying how customers control and scale virtual card capabilities. The solution addresses long-standing industry challenges, as 69% of companies struggle to integrate payment and business systems.
New enhancements to the platform include:
· Expanded card controls, including the ability to apply multiple control sets at the real card level — enabling controls to be enforced across all transactions and associated virtual cards without handling sensitive credentials
· Simplified integration and accelerated access to end-to-end payment capabilities by enabling virtual card creation and payment initiation in one seamless step
These capabilities offer businesses a more consistent way to integrate, control and scale their virtual card programs — helping them reduce operational complexity, accelerate time to value and innovate faster within a single, unified experience.
Embedding payments into the systems businesses already use
Since Mastercard launched its embedded VCN program globally in March 2025, dozens of partners across expense management, ERP and accounts payable systems — as well as travel, hospitality, healthcare and e-commerce platforms — have signed up for a simpler, more unified corporate payment experience. In Asia Pacific, Mastercard, together with Coupa and HSBC, recently completed its first live fully embedded finance virtual card transaction in the region, enabling Pact Group to make supplier payments using virtual cards embedded directly within its procurement platform. The milestone demonstrates the growing role of virtual cards in streamlining payment workflows and modernizing B2B commerce.
The program’s integration model – recognized by Kaiser Associates as industry-leading – reduces onboarding complexity for issuers, platforms, and corporates.
Mastercard was recently recognized as Emburse’s Innovation Partner of the Year, further reinforcing its role in embedding virtual cards into procurement and expense workflows to drive greater visibility and efficiency for businesses worldwide.
Continued traction across vertical-specific use cases like travel — including partnerships such as Juniper Travel, HBX Group, and TravelSoft — demonstrates the growing role of VCNs as a flexible, integrated payment solution across industries. In India, Mastercard’s collaboration with Volo Health is helping improve healthcare workflows by bringing greater automation and efficiency to payment, collection and reconciliation processes for payors and providers.
“As payments become more digitized and embedded into business workflows, expectations for performance, security and control are higher than ever,” said Marc Pettican, Global Head of Corporate Solutions at Mastercard. “We’re expanding our virtual card capabilities to deliver more unified and scalable experiences — helping partners simplify how they implement and scale virtual card programs with greater security, control and consistency.”
“Kaiser’s analysis shows that virtual card providers increasingly compete on operational proof: platform maturity, configurable controls, ERP connectivity, and implementation paths that reduce friction for issuers and corporates,” said Spencer Dunham, Vice President of Financial Services & Payments Practice at Kaiser Associates. “Against that backdrop, Mastercard’s In Control capabilities and Commercial Connect API give banks a differentiated foundation for scaling virtual card programs with greater control and less integration friction.”
Reducing risk and strengthening control across the payment lifecycle
As virtual card use grows across industries and regions, Mastercard continues to strengthen security at every stage of a transaction. Mastercard data shows that fraud rates are less than one-fifth on virtual cards compared to non-virtual cards, with that number being even lower when those virtual cards are issued through Mastercard In Control.
Mastercard is building on this with two distinct solutions that improve control across the virtual card lifecycle:
· Issuer Enforced Controls — a new capability — applies at the point of virtual card number creation and allows issuers to set baseline guardrails, such as spend limits, transaction limit caps, and validity periods, helping ensure compliant controls are in place from the start and reducing fraud risk across virtual card programs.
· Clearing Controls — introduced last year, now with new enhancements — extend control validation beyond authorization into the clearing stage. New enhancements enable corporates and platforms to block invalid transactions, apply more precise controls, and better manage payment timing, while supporting centralized policy management as programs scale.
Citi is already live with both Issuer Enforced and Clearing Controls and is expected to be the first issuer to roll out these VCN capabilities globally, later this year.
Together, these capabilities are underpinned by Mastercard’s network-level security, tokenization, and fraud monitoring, complemented by enterprise-grade cybersecurity solutions — delivering stronger, end-to-end protection across every stage of the transaction.
Enterprise-grade stability for e-commerce flows
With Mastercard In Control, e-commerce flows are supported in real time on a platform designed to be always available, fast, and resilient. The platform offers smooth, secure, and dependable payment experiences that customers can trust — at e-commerce scale.
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