HSBC announced today that it is partnering with digital card fintech Extend to offer virtual card solutions and embedded payments to its business clients.

Commercial card customers of HSBC USA, owned by $2.9 trillion, London-based HSBC Holdings, are now able to create, send and manage virtual cards throughout their organizations via the latest Extend partnership, according to a release.

“A lot of companies are embedding payments,” Extend Chief Executive Andrew Jamison told Bank Automation News. “Think of multiple franchise businesses — those clients need different virtual cards for different parts of the business.

“You need to be able to spin up these accounts, not someone manually typing in [card information],” he said.

The cloud-based fintech connects to its clients via a modern stack of RESTful APIs, Jamison said. “What [Extend] is doing is sharing that line of credit that’s associated with your card into tiny little fractional pieces with amazing controls with every one of those cards.” This allows commercial clients to specify where, when and how much can be spent on any of its virtual cards.

For HSBC clients, the capability adds “speed, scale and transparency,” Jamison said. For example, Extend adds multi-use or recurring card limits and rules to set budgets and automated payment reconciliations – saving chief financial officers time at month-end.

Embedded systems innovation

Additionally, Extend is working with HSBC to drive innovation specifically in embedded and connected payments, according to Jamison. The fintech is figuring out how it can “create a connected payment ecosystem where we can be inside of the procurement platforms that these companies use,” he said.

“That’s a key part of where we go next – stop reinventing new experiences and start connecting experiences and having the payments being part of the fabric,” Jamison added.

At the request of Extend’s bank clients, the fintech is working to expand its offerings to include card portfolio management and software platform integration in 2023, he said, noting, “We’re going to go from the card distribution that we built. We’re going upstream to manage physical cards and downstream to manage the embedding of those transactions into the [companies’] ledgers.”

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