Turn your commercial platform into a financial powerhouse

Think for a moment about everything your customers buy to do the work you help them manage. A plumbing company orders pipe and fittings from a dozen suppliers. A landscaping crew fills its trucks with fuel every morning. An HVAC technician drives to the supply house at four in the afternoon for a compressor part because the job can't wait until tomorrow.

That money moves every day, and much of it moves somewhere other than your platform. It goes on the owner's personal credit card, through a bank portal your customer logs into separately, or out of a petty cash envelope that someone reconciles by hand at the end of the month.

That spending represents a revenue opportunity that is easy to overlook. When it runs through commercial cards offered inside your product, your platform may be able to earn a share of the interchange those transactions generate, and your customers get tools for problems they have often been solving with spreadsheets.

How interchange revenue works for platforms

Interchange is the fee a merchant's bank pays to the cardholder's bank each time a card transaction is processed. When a B2B platform offers cards through a program manager and BIN sponsor arrangement, the platform may receive a share of this interchange as program revenue.

Key terms:

• BIN sponsor: A licensed bank that issues the cards, provides access to the card networks, and oversees the program's compliance with network rules and regulations

BIN sponsor: A licensed bank that issues the cards, provides access to the card networks, and oversees the program's compliance with network rules and regulations

• Program manager: The entity (often the platform or a partner) that operates the card program day-to-day

Program manager: The entity (often the platform or a partner) that operates the card program day-to-day

• Interchange share: The portion of interchange fees passed to the platform, determined by bank partner agreements and program structure

Interchange share: The portion of interchange fees passed to the platform, determined by bank partner agreements and program structure

Revenue potential depends on card volume, card type (credit vs. debit), merchant category, card network rules, applicable regulations, and your specific bank partner agreement.

The money is already being spent

The case for embedded payments is often made as though you would have to convince your customers to start doing something new. In many cases you don't, because they already pay suppliers, already hand cards or cash to their field teams, and already chase receipts at the end of every month. The question is whether that activity happens inside your product or outside it.

Consider a hypothetical platform with 2,000 business customers. If each of them moved $15,000 a month of operating spend onto cards offered through that platform, the result would be $360 million a year in card volume. How much revenue that volume could generate depends on factors including your program structure, card type, card network rules, bank partner agreements, and applicable regulations, which is why any estimate should be modeled for your specific program. This example is illustrative only and is not a projection of results.

Why your customers may make the move

Consider Leo, a hypothetical plumbing contractor with fourteen trucks and eighteen technicians. In a typical week he orders from a dozen suppliers, advances money to a subcontractor, and covers overtime nobody planned for. To find out whether he can afford all of it, he moves between his scheduling software, his bank's website, and a spreadsheet his office manager updates when she has time. His technicians call the office twice a week to ask when they will be reimbursed for parts they bought with their own money.

Now picture Leo doing all of that from the same platform where he books his jobs. When a technician needs an emergency part, Leo issues a virtual card from his phone that can be restricted to that supplier and that amount, and when your platform connects card data to its job records, the charge can land in his books already matched to the job. Supplier invoices are approved and paid on the same screen where he sees tomorrow's schedule, and he can see where his cash is going while it is still going there.

Leo's situation is common. Many businesses his size operate on thin margins, and cash flow problems are among the most frequently cited reasons small businesses fail, so a single late invoice or slow-paying client can create real strain. The tools they use to manage that strain are scattered, too. McKinsey's B2B Pulse research found that B2B customers use an average of ten interaction channels in their buying journey, and that more than half want a seamless experience across those channels and are likely to switch suppliers if they don't get one. A report from PYMNTS and American Express found that 67% of B2B buyers have switched to vendors offering a more consumer-like experience. Your customers are looking for simpler ways to run their businesses, and a platform that brings payments into the workflow they already use is well positioned to become harder to leave.

What makes it work: control at the moment of purchase

Plenty of providers can put a card inside your product. What matters to a business owner is control, and in particular whether the rules they set are applied when the purchase happens rather than discovered after it shows up on a statement.

Marqeta's platform is built around that moment. When one of your customer's cards is used, the transaction can be checked in real time against dynamic spend controls your platform defines:

• Merchant restrictions: Which suppliers or merchant categories are allowed

Merchant restrictions: Which suppliers or merchant categories are allowed

• Spending limits: Maximum transaction or daily amounts

Spending limits: Maximum transaction or daily amounts

• Time controls: When purchases can happen

Time controls: When purchases can happen

• Job allocation: Which project or cost center the spend belongs to

Job allocation: Which project or cost center the spend belongs to

With Just-in-Time Funding, a program can be configured so that cards carry no standing balance and funds move onto the card at the moment a purchase is authorized. For an owner like Leo, controls like these can help reduce the risk of handing a card to a new technician, because the card can be limited to the merchants, amounts, and times the business approves.

For your product team, it means you can design controls that fit your industry through APIs and deliver them inside the experience you have already built. The same platform supports supplier payments, so your customers can approve and pay invoices within your product, and expense management tools that can help automate reconciliation and reduce the time spent chasing receipts. Marqeta's cloud-based platform is designed to support programs as they scale.

What it looks like in practice

Found, a financial platform built for self-employed people and small business owners, partnered with Marqeta to offer virtual and physical cards with dynamic spend controls. Found's customers can flag or stop suspicious transactions and keep business and personal spending separate within the Found app. [Insert a result from the Found case study only if Found has approved it for publication.]

Switching costs point in one direction

Payments tend to create switching costs, and those costs favor whoever holds the cards. Once a customer has issued cards to twenty technicians, connected their supplier payments, and built their bookkeeping around a system, moving everything is a project many businesses would rather avoid. That stickiness can work in your favor if the cards live in your product. If they live in a competitor's product, or in a standalone fintech app your customer adopted because you didn't offer an alternative, the same stickiness can work against you.

The opportunity may also extend beyond cards. In a 2023 Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Voices survey, 77% of small business owners said they were concerned about their ability to access capital. A platform that already supports a customer's payments may be well placed to offer additional financial tools over time, including credit products provided through bank or lending partners.

Explore what your customers' spending could be worth

The best way to evaluate this opportunity is to model it. Tell us how many customers you serve and what industry they work in, and our team can walk you through an illustrative estimate of the card volume and interchange potential for a program like yours.