Credit cards are ubiquitous and an essential tool for businesses to have. They can make it easier to track your business’s expenses. Plus, they offer benefits like interest-free financing for short periods and cash back rewards.
However, things can get complicated if you want to give your employees credit cards for business purposes. A card issuing platform can help you better manage your employee cards and track spending.
What Is a Card Issuing Platform?
A card issuing platform is a tool or financial service you can use to create digital or physical forms of payment, such as a prepaid card or credit card.
If you run a business with multiple employees, you may want to give those employees a business credit card. However, managing and keeping track of them can be a headache once you have more than two or three business cards.
Card issuing platforms help make your life easier by providing you with a tool or dashboard to manage the cards. You can use them to generate your company's virtual or physical cards.
Most platforms also make it easy to track how the cardholders use the cards in real time, letting you keep an eye on your company’s expenses.
Many modern card issuing platforms are fintech companies that integrate with digital wallets and offer powerful APIs so that you can track the data that is most important to your company.
Best Card Issuing Platforms
If you’re looking for a card issuing platform for your company, consider these options.
Dash.fi
Dash.fi, partnered with Mastercard, offers a business credit card for companies that expect to spend a lot on digital advertising.
Included with your card is a platform that makes generating additional cards easy and dash.fi lets you issue an unlimited number of virtual cards.
You can track spending by each card, which allows you to keep an eye on every employee’s spending or use different cards for different expenses. In turn, this tracking helps you monitor your budget. The platform even offers risk management options, such as creating a single-use payment card.
The card also offers 3% cash back on ad spending for the first two months of card ownership.
Pleo
Pleo is another company that offers virtual credit cards for businesses. However, the company also allows you to generate physical cards you can hand out to your employees.
One unique feature of Pleo is the ability to issue prepaid debit cards. You can use these to give your employees a strict budget for specific purchases or to give them funds to spend on a business trip or meal.
Pleo even comes with the tools you’d expect from a strong business card product, including expense tracking, compatibility with digital payments apps and mobile wallets, and tools to help with expense management.
Galileo
Galileo takes a different focus from other credit card platforms. Instead of letting you issue employee cards, it helps you generate cards for your customers.
The platform supports many use cases through its credit cards, debit cards, and loyalty cards. Loyalty cards are an incredibly effective card product for improving the customer experience.
These cards make tracking customer interactions with your business and spending habits easier. You can use that information to provide personalized services or offers.
Galileo offers features like immediate provisioning and activation for virtual cards so that customers can instantly add their new card to a virtual wallet and start using it. It also integrates with payment services like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and the Visa payment network.
Bento for Business
Bento for Business is, as the name suggests, a business-focused card issuing platform. This platform focuses on debit cards and lets you issue cards with daily spending limits or restrictions based on merchant categories to improve security.
The company claims it can help businesses spend 15% less with its tools, a huge savings.
You can customize the controls you set for each card and track spending on a card-by-card basis to help with budgeting and expense tracking. The service also provides automated expense reporting and stores receipts for you.
What to Look For in a Card Issuing Platform
Choosing the right card issuing platform for your business is essential. These are some key features to look for.
Instant Virtual Cards
In today’s digital age, it’s easy to do almost all your shopping and spending online. Having a physical credit card can be unnecessary in some scenarios.
Instead, you can use virtual cards to make payments online or add them to digital wallets on your phone for use when you want to make purchases in person.
Good card management tools can immediately generate and activate virtual cards. They also let you deactivate them at will, making it easy to manage your company’s cards.
Ease of Use
With any business service, you want to ensure the tool is simple to use and that the company you’re working with has strong customer support.
Look for card issuing platforms with intuitive dashboards that make it hassle-free to issue and deactivate cards. You also want it to be easy to track spending.
These tools are meant to simplify your company’s finances. Spending hours sifting through different program pages to find necessary information is ultimately not helpful.
Automation
Many card issuing platforms offer tools to help you track your company’s spending. For example, you can monitor spending on a card-by-card basis or use reporting to view spending at certain merchants or on specific categories.
Look for a service that automates tracking of these things and generates reports for you. Some platforms can also automate the receipt and payment of invoices.
The more your card issuing platform can automate for you, the less work you have to do to keep track of your company’s finances.
Integrations
Having a card issuing platform that tracks and categorizes spending is useful. However, having information in multiple places can be annoying if you rely on another service for your bookkeeping.
Look for tools that integrate with popular business services like Quickbooks. More importantly, make sure the platform integrates with the services you already use.
If your card issuing service easily slots into your current business workflow, that’s a huge plus.
Card Limits
Some card issuing services may limit the number of cards you can generate. The more cards you can issue, the better.
Ideally, look for a service that won’t restrict the number of cards you can issue.
Customization
The more options your card issuing platform gives you, the more likely you’ll be able to set up your company cards in a way that works well for your business.
Look for options that allow you to customize how you use your cards to ensure you get the most value possible from the platform.
Summary
If you want a credit card for your business, look for issuing platforms that let you set spending controls, issue credit and debit cards, integrate applications already in your company’s workflow, and help to track spending seamlessly.
Beyond that, customizable card designs that you can put on your physical cards are a fun perk that can also give your company a more professional feel when you use your cards in person.
