Mastercard has announced a series of enhancements to Mastercard In Control, its virtual card number (VCN) platform, adding new issuer controls, enhanced clearing controls and expanded embedded payments capabilities aimed at helping enterprises and financial institutions manage virtual card programmes with greater security, visibility and scale.

Mastercard’s VCN ecosystem now spans issuers, direct platforms and corporates transacting across 43 countries and territories — including 14 in Asia Pacific — and 174 currencies. Citi will be the first issuer to deploy the new capabilities globally.

New controls across the payment lifecycle

The enhancements include Issuer Enforced Controls, a new capability applied at the point of virtual card number creation that lets issuers set baseline guardrails such as spend limits, transaction caps and validity periods. Clearing Controls, introduced last year and now enhanced, extend control validation beyond authorisation into the clearing stage, letting corporates and platforms block invalid transactions and manage payment timing with centralised policy management as programmes scale.

Mastercard said fraud rates are less than one-fifth on virtual cards compared with non-virtual cards, a figure that falls further when cards are issued through Mastercard In Control. Citi is already live with both Issuer Enforced and Clearing Controls.

“For corporates across Asia Pacific, a region that touches the majority of the world’s largest trade corridors, the pressure isn’t just to digitize payments, it’s to manage supplier relationships and working capital across increasingly complex cross-border operations,” said Anouska Ladds, Executive Vice President, Commercial and New Payment Flows, Asia Pacific, Mastercard.

A single API and growing embedded payments network

Mastercard’s Commercial Connect API, which it describes as the market’s only single-API front door, is designed to simplify how customers control and scale virtual card capabilities, addressing a challenge that reportedly affects 69 per cent of companies struggling to integrate payment and business systems. New enhancements let businesses apply multiple control sets at the real card level and combine virtual card creation with payment initiation in a single step.

In Asia Pacific, Mastercard, together with Coupa and HSBC, recently completed its first live fully embedded finance virtual card transaction in the region, enabling Pact Group to make supplier payments using virtual cards embedded directly within its procurement platform. In India, Mastercard’s collaboration with Volo Health is bringing greater automation to payment, collection and reconciliation processes for healthcare payors and providers.

“As payments become more digitized and embedded into business workflows, expectations for performance, security and control are higher than ever,” said Marc Pettican, Global Head of Corporate Solutions at Mastercard.