Mastercard today introduced a suite of digital offerings for small business owners who are Mastercard Business and World Elite cardholders. The new offerings include discounts to Intuit products like QuickBooks and TurboTax, a 24/7 personalized business assistant, ID theft protection, as well as automatic savings on business expenses.

Amnah Ajmal, EVP of Core Products for North America at Mastercard, said the company’s commercial strategy is consistent with its consumer strategy in that both segments are looking to deliver similar customer experiences. Ajmal said Mastercard is leveraging technologies and strategic partnerships to provide small businesses with simple and relevant products and services for day-to-day operations that consumers have come to expect for their everyday lives.

“Delivering on today’s increasingly digital needs, we have made sure that it’s not only the ‘what’ in the product, which should be meaningful, but how they’re experiencing the product that truly matters to the customer,” Ajmal said. “We have made the entire experience of redeeming these benefits and experiences seamless, automated, no-stress, with no point accumulation, super simple, intuitive, and end-to-end digital.”

At the end of 2018, there were about 875 million Mastercard credit cards in circulation globally, with about 231 million being in the US alone, according to Statista.

She said Mastercard’s segment research found that 80% of small business owners lack C-suite support or a helpline to run their day-to-day business. Enter Mastercard’s 24/7 Business Assistant, which she said is a personalized assistant that provides access to services like locating tech support or a recruiting service, arranging client dinners, securing a meeting room, or purchasing gifts. This is not an app-based service. Ajmal said the assistant service is available digitally, but that calling the actual agents at the contact center is the preferred method.

“It’s what the segment wants because the needs are very specific and they would like to interact with an agent to get all the needs communicated and just hear back what the possibilities are,” she said.

The new offerings also include Mastercard Receipt Management, made possible by a partnership with Itemize Corp., a fintech that extracts data from receipts and invoices. Ajmal said Mastercard will provide a mobile app to help small business cardholders track paper and digital receipts, capture key purchase data, categorize their expenses, and view/export customized reports.

She also touted the availability of Mastercard ID Theft Protection, through which cardholders will have access to a protection service that monitors their personal and business information, as well as access to a team of identity theft resolution specialists, available online 24/7.

Also see: New Mastercard Rewards Program Features Automatic, Instant Redemption

Ajmal acknowledged that customer experience innovation in the small business segment has lagged behind that the consumer segment. but she pointed to a growing interest among industry players to address the shortcoming.

“It has been slow, but I think there’s a lot of passion and focus for the small business segment in the industry right now,” she said. “That’s why we were able to form these partnerships and our issuing partners are super excited about the new value propositions since it doesn’t cost them any kind of implementation headache. It’s a super simple product offering for them and it’s super simple for their customers, as well.”

It’s worth noting that Mastercard and Bill.com, a business payments and software platform firm, announced a partnership last month through which Bill.com will offer Mastercard virtual cards as part of its automated accounts payable solution for small and midsize businesses. Bill.com had said the SMB segment was “ripe for disruption” as innovation in business payments has lagged behind the strides made in consumer payments.