Mastercard’s Marc Pettican on the road to a $17.4 trillion virtual card market
What's happening
Mastercard is pushing virtual cards as a solution to corporate payments friction, with Marc Pettican laying out a path to a potential $17.4 trillion virtual card market driven by AP/AR inefficiencies (invoices chased multiple times, payments over 30% late, large credit control teams). Mastercard is building rails and value-added services that link network scale, data and controls, positioning virtual cards for B2B use alongside moves from American Express and other networks to turn corporate payments into a living control layer. Card networks are also tightening dispute and fraud monitoring (Mastercard launched GMAP as Visa tightens evidence windows), while issuers and banks invest in richer payments data and faster credential/token flows to support new agentic and AI-driven payment use cases.
Why it's trending
Because networks are aligning tech (virtual cards, tokens, data, control layers) with changing merchant risk rules and AI-driven commerce, making virtual cards a rapid-growth product for B2B payments now.
SignalHolding at its usual pace, confirmed across 2 independent source types.
Story volume
Stories per dayAngles you could write
If everyone says speed is the B2B payments win, Mastercard is betting control will win the market, and that control could be worth $17.4 trillion.
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Original sources7
- Mastercard’s Marc Pettican on the road to a $17.4 trillion virtual card market
Every accounts payable and accounts receivable department runs on the same friction: invoices chased four or five times, payments late more than 30% of the time, and credit control teams that can run 20, 30, even 50 people deep at a mid-sized corporate. Virtual cards were built to solve exactly that problem, and the growth … Continue reading "Mastercard’s Marc Pettican on the road to a
TearsheetAug 5 - Merchants Face a Two-Year AI Shopping Deadline
A new card can reach a digital wallet in seconds. Loyalty still takes longer, and one weak experience can send a card straight to the back of the wallet. The Issuer Engagement Playbook, “Removing Friction, Winning Loyalty: How Top Issuers Remove Cardholder Friction to Grow Customer Lifetime Value,” examines how leading card issuers build stronger […] The post Merchants Face a Two-Year AI Sho
PYMNTSAug 5 - Card networks are quietly shifting dispute risk onto merchants faster than most tools can adapt
Two changes worth flagging for this sub: Visa cut its evidence submission window to 9 days for US/Canada merchants (18 days elsewhere) as of July 2025, down significantly from before Mastercard just launched GMAP, its version of Visa's VAMP, tightening monitoring of merchant dispute/fraud ratios Together these point to networks optimizing for fewer disputes system-wide, but pushing more of the com
r/fintechAug 4
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