Rebecca PY MALAYSIA, 27 JULY 2026 – Mastercard today announced a series of enhancements to Mastercard In Control, the virtual card number platform that Kaiser Associates recognizes as an industry leader, reinforcing the company’s position in secure, scalable B2B payments. The new innovations include advanced virtual card controls designed to reduce risk across the full payment lifecycle, along with a single 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 virtual card number ecosystem now includes issuers, direct platforms, and corporates transacting across 43 countries and territories, including 14 in Asia Pacific, and 174 currencies, reflecting its capacity to support global expansion while maintaining consistency and oversight.
Anouska Ladds, Executive Vice President, Commercial and New Payment Flows, Asia Pacific at Mastercard, said corporates across Asia Pacific face pressure not just to digitize payments but to manage supplier relationships and working capital across increasingly complex cross-border operations. She said virtual cards give finance and procurement teams a way to extend flexibility without adding risk or friction to supplier relationships, which is why virtual cards are becoming an integral part of how businesses in the region pay.
Delivering a more unified, scalable experience for virtual card programs
The Commercial Connect API, described by Kaiser Associates as the market’s only single-API front door, is simplifying how customers control and scale virtual card capabilities. The solution addresses a persistent industry challenge, with 69% of companies reporting difficulty integrating payment and business systems.
New enhancements to the platform include expanded card controls that allow multiple control sets to be applied at the real card level, enabling enforcement across all transactions and associated virtual cards without handling sensitive credentials. The platform also now offers simplified integration that lets businesses create virtual cards and initiate payments in a single step, reducing operational complexity and accelerating time to value.
Embedding payments into existing business systems
Since Mastercard launched its embedded virtual card number program globally in March 2025, dozens of partners across expense management, ERP, accounts payable, travel, hospitality, healthcare, and e-commerce platforms have adopted the simplified corporate payment experience. In Asia Pacific, Mastercard partnered with Coupa and HSBC to complete the region’s first live, fully embedded finance virtual card transaction, enabling Pact Group to make supplier payments through virtual cards embedded directly in its procurement platform.
Mastercard was also recently named Emburse’s Innovation Partner of the Year, reflecting its role in embedding virtual cards into procurement and expense workflows. The company continues to expand into vertical-specific use cases such as travel, through partnerships with Juniper Travel, HBX Group, and TravelSoft, while its collaboration with Volo Health in India is helping improve automation in healthcare payment, collection, and reconciliation processes.
Marc Pettican, Global Head of Corporate Solutions at Mastercard, said that as payments become more digitized and embedded into business workflows, expectations for performance, security, and control continue to rise, and that the company’s expanded virtual card capabilities are designed to help partners scale their programs with greater consistency.
Spencer Dunham, Vice President of Financial Services and Payments Practice at Kaiser Associates, said the firm’s analysis shows virtual card providers increasingly compete on operational factors such as platform maturity, configurable controls, ERP connectivity, and smoother implementation paths, adding that Mastercard’s capabilities give banks a differentiated foundation for scaling virtual card programs with less integration friction. Reducing risk across the payment lifecycle Mastercard data shows fraud rates on virtual cards are less than one-fifth of those on non-virtual cards, with rates even lower for virtual cards issued through Mastercard In Control. The company is strengthening this further with two capabilities: Issuer Enforced Controls, a new feature that applies at the point of virtual card creation to let issuers set baseline guardrails such as spend limits and validity periods, and enhanced Clearing Controls, first introduced last year, which now extend validation beyond authorization into the clearing stage to help block invalid transactions and manage payment timing. Citi is already live with both capabilities and is expected to be the first issuer to roll out the features globally later this year. Scott Southall, Global Head of Citi Commercial Cards and Domestic Payments, said the collaboration with Mastercard positions Citi as the first issuer to deliver these advanced security capabilities at global scale, reinforcing the bank’s commitment to helping clients operate more securely and efficiently. Kalie Phillips, Vice President of Product Management at Emburse, said the partnership with Mastercard helps make virtual cards a seamless part of everyday business workflows while giving customers greater security, control, and visibility. Sofoklis Limniotis, Strategy and Solutions Director at HBX Group, said the collaboration combines the company’s travel expertise with Mastercard’s network scale and security to deliver more seamless payment experiences across the travel value chain.