Accept Commercial Card Payments at your business

Commercial credit cards are being used to replace inefficient and expensive paper purchase order processes by businesses, corporations and government agencies of all sizes.  Therefore, accepting commercial credit cards like Corporate, Business, Purchasing (P-cards) and GSA purchasing cards are becoming an increasingly important component of a company’s payment policies.

Commercial cards have unique bank identification numbers (BIN).  You can tell from the first 6 digits of the card what kind of commercial card your customer is presenting for payment and then look up the best available Interchange that card can qualify for in order to compute the costs of acceptance. 

Use of commercial card payments is growing quickly

Overall purchase card use is growing in North American by double digit percentages representing billions of dollars in new spending with expected purchasing card growth projected to hit $290 billion by 2016.   

According to the eInvoicing Adoption Benchmarking Report by PayStream Advisors, Purchase cards are the most widely used e-payment with an 84% adoption rate with many moreorganizations planning on implementing P-card programs.  Corporations and businesses are aggressively adopting purchasing, corporate and business credit cards to reduce administrative expenses and identify opportunities for savings. A survey of almost 1,300 purchase card program administrators from corporations, nonprofits, and government entities found a $53 administrative cost savings per transaction compared to purchase orders. 

These same P-card benefits allow state and federal goverments to make purchases more quickly and more conveniently than previously used methods of purchasing. Because of these benefits, more agencies are attempting to shift purchasing to vendors that accept cards. And card use by federal entities is expected to continue growing as they identify additional ways of using cards and implement new payment technologies.  Consider that more than 350 federal entities participate in GSA's SmartPay program— using purchasing cards (p-cards) to make purchases of goods and services needed for their operations, spending more than $30 billion on over 100 million transactions a year.  And if you sell to the government (and almost a quarter of all federal prime contracts and 40 percent of all subcontracts go to small businesses) then you will want to pay close attention to new GSA mandates that will require level 3 data processing in order to secure new government contracts. 

Establish a Vantage Level 3 merchant account

For merchants, the benefits of accepting P-cards as payments include improving profitability by reducing payment time from 30-60 days to 2-3 days, reducing collection expenses and reducing the cost of floating funds until payments are received.  Accepting purchase cards with a processing technology that can pass Level 3 data (line item invoice detail) will increase your competitiveness in winning new contracts and may even be a requirement of your buyers. 

Qualifying for Level 3 Interchange rates will reduce processing expensive over traditional retail and MOTO merchant processing.   Let our payment advisors compile a comprehensive savings analysis for your review showing the impact Level 3 Interchange can make on your bottom line.