Checkout.com and Mastercard Offer Virtual Cards for Travel Agents

Checkout.com has teamed with Mastercard to offer virtual cards to online travel agents. 

“As part of the Mastercard Wholesale Program, which reduces costs for travel businesses through virtual card technology and an innovative pricing model, customers of Checkout.com will be able to pay their suppliers more easily and benefit from higher conversion rates by issuing virtual cards,” the companies said in a Thursday (May 2) news release. 

George Simon, executive vice president for market development for Mastercard Europe, noted that the collaboration will help the more than 400,000 travel providers that use the wholesale program to enable payments. 

For its part, Checkout.com said it combines acquiring and issuing to help online travel agents move from receiving customer payments to paying suppliers. 

“Traditionally, online travel agents had to manage these two sides of their business separately, which can lead to inefficiencies and increased potential for error,” the release said. “Checkout.com’s integrated solution ensures a seamless flow from customer payment acquisition to supplier payouts, turning what used to be a cumbersome process into a cohesive, streamlined operation. In turn, this deepens trust and relationships within the ecosystem.”

The news follows last week’s announcement that global commerce platform WEX has launched a virtual card collaboration with Booking.com.

The arrangement is an expansion of an 11-year-old partnership between the two firms, with WEX becoming Booking.com’s virtual card provider and WEX’s payment solutions enhancing Booking.com’s travel-related products and services sales. 

Recent reporting and research by PYMNTS has found that virtual cards are a payment solution that help middle-market businesses at a time of increased uncertainty. 

Data from PYMNTS Intelligence’s recently released edition of the 2024 Certainty Project Report, “Optimizing AR to Mitigate Uncertainty for Middle-Market Businesses” showed that companies that aren’t using virtual cards also happen to experience an average revenue loss of 4.6% due to payment uncertainties. (Bigger, more financially robust firms have seen a lower impact.)

“Because uncertainty impacts smaller middle-market firms in a bigger way, those smaller organizations may also stand to see the most benefits in integrating advanced payment solutions — such as virtual cards — into their financial operations,” PYMNTS wrote.

“We think virtual cards are really at a tipping point,” Previse founder and CEO Paul Christensen said in an interview here in April.

“There are trillions of dollars that are going to move to virtual cards in the next two, three, four, five years,” he added.

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