Digital payments are gaining popularity with consumers and suppliers as digital wallets, digital issuance and the overall payments landscape continues to evolve.

As consumers look to digital wallet capabilities that extend beyond Apple Pay, a Gartner report released June 28, How Will Digital Wallets Evolve in the Future, explores “Where do we go from here?”

Gartner found that digital wallets will be useful for payments and digital identity management, the ability to share encrypted identity credentials or payments details, and giving clients more control of their finances and data.

As clients gain more access to digital wallets and payments, the B2B payments space, too, has moved toward digital.

According to RPMG Research Corp.’s 2022 Virtual Card Benchmark Survey, 90% of suppliers prefer receiving payments digitally.

In fact, Mastercard expanded its virtual card payments process to improve B2B payments Monday through the launch of its Mastercard Receivables Manager, Chad Wallace, global head of Commercial Solutions at Mastercard, told Bank Automation News. The receivable solution, created in collaboration with B2B software and payments platform BillTrust, was the logical next step as the bank has focused on the payable side of virtual transactions “for a while,” he said.

“We’re bridging the gap between buyers’ virtual card preferences and suppliers’ acceptance challenges by automating manual processes and transforming the way account receivable teams operate,” Wallace said in a Mastercard release.

Receiving digital payments

Digital cards have continued to gain momentum in B2B payments, Wallace said, noting that the manual capture of digital payments was not sustainable.

Today, during the transaction, virtual cards are generated, and an email goes through the supplier and then the payment is processed with the acquirer, Wallace said. Through the solution, the receipt of the email into the acquiring platform is now automated, and that data is shared with the enterprise resource planning team, simplifying the reconciliation process, too.

The Mastercard solution offers file delivery products and API-based integrations, Wallace said. It is turnkey and there is no waiting period once the integration is complete.

More innovation is needed, because “ultimately, we would love a world with no email,” he said. “And so, at that point, we believe that the next step is for us to automate that process as much as possible and introduce the ability to streamline accounts receivable teams in a way that allows our customers to be able to really take advantage of that automation.”