Visa Invests in B2B Payments Provider Billtrust

Visa Inc. reported Tuesday that it has invested in Billtrust and is working with the business-to-business payments provider to streamline the reconciliation of B2B payments and increase the automation of virtual card payments for financial institutions and their corporate customers.

The companies did not reveal the size of Visa’s investment, and a Visa spokesperson could not be reached for comment Tuesday morning. But the investment represents the latest round of financial support by a major payments company into a tech company serving one of its niches. In February, Visa acquired online risk-control technology provider CardinalCommerce Corp.

Visa and Hamilton, N.J.-based Billtrust said they are working on a “multi-pronged strategy … to support growth in the B2B segment,” according to a press release. Although check payments by companies are declining, checks still play a more prominent role in business payments than they do with consumers.

“Collaboration with leading partners like Billtrust helps our financial-institution clients streamline the B2B payments process for their commercial customers, better support supplier needs, and simplify the process suppliers have to go through in order to accept a payment,” Taira Hall, vice president, U.S. partnerships and new initiatives, business solutions, at Visa, said in a statement.

To reduce paper-based payments, businesses can accept virtual credit cards with 16-digit account numbers, just like plastic cards. But businesses’ accounts-receivable departments still need to enter data from them manually. With their joint offering, Billtrust’s Virtual Card Capture solution will use Visa’s Straight Through Processing service to automate accounts-receivable functions.

Straight Through Processing enables a business customer of a financial institution to initiate a Visa commercial card transaction directly from its accounting system. And with Billtrust’s Virtual Card Capture, payments sent to Billtrust suppliers are routed to Billtrust for processing, and the funds are deposited into a supplier’s bank account the next business day, the release says. The remittance is consolidated across all payment sources and matched to corresponding open invoices

“The integration of Visa’s Straight Through Processing and our Virtual Card Capture enables suppliers to more expediently manage a traditionally manual, cumbersome payment process,” Flint Lane, Billtrust’s chief executive, said in the release.