CFOs Tap Commercial Cards for Control, Not Just Payables

Working capital is no longer just a buffer for struggling firms. It’s becoming a growth engine for forward-thinking and strategic finance teams.

And according to findings from the 2025/2026 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index, a Visa report in collaboration with PYMNTS Intelligence, commercial cards are becoming one of its most powerful accelerators.

The reason? Unlike other payables modernization initiatives, which can usually mean something messy entailing enterprise software migrations, workflow redesigns and integration headaches; commercial cards can be used as precision instruments of control inside corporate finance operations.

Per the report, 44% of CFOs use commercial cards to streamline payment workflows, 43% cite better control over approvals and 40% highlight reduced operational burden.

No rip-and-replace overhaul needed.

How Commercial Cards Are Reshaping Payables and Working Capital Efficiency

Once relegated to travel and small-ticket purchases, corporate cards have evolved into strategic instruments for liquidity control, spend visibility and supplier agility. In 2025, their role in enterprise finance looks less like a line of credit and more like a programmable layer of governance — one that lets companies manage the timing and flow of money with precision that older systems were never designed to deliver.

The underlying tension in payables is simple: companies want to move fast, but finance wants to stay in control. The bigger the organization, the more friction accumulates in that balancing act. Invoice approvals, purchase orders, and manual reconciliations all exist to prevent leaks, errors, or fraud, but they also slow down the business.

Cards promise a middle ground. By embedding the same controls directly into the payment instrument, companies can compress the time between intent and action without losing oversight. A virtual card issued for a specific vendor, amount and time window, for instance, eliminates the ambiguity of open credit lines or vague purchase orders. It’s a payment that obeys a rulebook.

Read more: Working Capital Index Finds Adaptive Mid-Market CFOs Turning Risk Into Growth

The second major shift is informational. Traditional payables data lives in silos — a vendor invoice in one system, a bank statement in another, an expense report somewhere else. Reconciling those pieces requires manual labor and often results in partial visibility.

Card rails invert that model. Each transaction carries rich, structured metadata: merchant category codes, item details, time stamps and even location data. When linked to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or spend-management platform, that stream of data can automatically populate ledgers, flag anomalies and power analytics on spend behavior.

The efficiencies are cascading. Per the report, growth corporates have integrated 45 percent of their suppliers into digital payment systems and paid 37 percent of invoices ahead of schedule, an achievement that would have been unthinkable under older, paper-based models. For suppliers, the benefits are equally clear: faster settlements, more predictable cash inflows and reduced collections risk. For buyers, it means leverage — the ability to negotiate from a position of reliability and data-backed transparency.

The same infrastructure that once powered travel and expense (T&E) programs now supports core payables. When companies pay suppliers via card, funds move quickly, but the buyer retains up to 30 to 45 days of float until the card statement is due. In a high-interest-rate environment, that window becomes strategically valuable, essentially a short-term, interest-free source of liquidity that doesn’t burden the balance sheet.

Read more: Study Finds Working Capital Efficiency Unlocks $19M Average Savings for Middle Market Companies

At the same time, card data enhances auditability and compliance. CFOs gain a transparent view of who spent what, where, and when—insight that previously required cross-referencing invoices, purchase orders, and bank statements. In this sense, cards act as both control and catalyst: they enforce payment discipline while enabling flexibility in how cash is deployed.

For companies wary of disruption, virtual cards offer an on-ramp. They layer on top of existing payables systems rather than replacing them. A finance team can pilot virtual cards for a narrow spend category — marketing, software subscriptions or logistics, for instance — and gradually expand. Because the underlying payment rail remains the same network infrastructure as corporate cards, integration tends to be minimal.

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