Virtual Cards: Convenient Expenses for Your Team

With the meteoric rise in online commerce over the years, chances are your customers aren’t making in-store purchases for your products or services. They’ll be doing all that online, and they’ve probably gotten quite comfortable with it.

While credit and debit cards are sufficient for these kinds of purchases, there’s another safer, more convenient, online solution: virtual cards. In case you haven’t heard about virtual cards, Qonto offers this product for its customers, so they can make 100% online purchases in a safe and secure way.

In this blog post, we’ll cover the basics of virtual cards and how you can get the most out of yours.

A virtual card is an online payment ‘card’ that is linked to your credit or debit card account. The virtual card looks identical to your physical card, with its own virtual credit card number on the front and security code on the back.

Part of what makes your virtual card safer is that only your card issuer has access to the details. While services like Google Pay offer entirely online payment methods, your details are held online and connected to your main bank account. This means that if your main account is compromised, you will have to close the account and all cards linked to it. With a virtual card, only the physical card to which it is linked is at risk of fraud, making the process much less of a headache.

With a virtual card you can basically do anything you would with a physical payment card. Even in-store purchases are possible with your smartphone. Let’s go through a few of the major perks of using a virtual card.

With virtual cards, business trips are made simple for you and your team. No longer does every employee have to keep track of their physical cards before and during the trip. You can instead supply teams with virtual cards so they can autonomously buy tickets and pay for their trips so you can focus on your business. Of course, if you’d still prefer to use physical cards in your team, this option is available too.You can even take virtual cards further and give your team Instant cards instead. They are Qonto's new solution for occasional expenses that may require several payments. Each user of an Instant Card gets a pre-determined budget to be spent over a set period of time, making them perfect for business trips.

If your company has a focus on paid search marketing—Google ads, Facebook ads, Bing ads, etc.—then you and your team are probably making a lot of online purchases. Autonomise all this online spending by giving your team virtual cards. This way they can set up subscriptions, make one off payments, and buy new software—all without the need of a physical card.

Keep your office stocked with pens, sticky notes, lunch deliveries, and everything else you might need for the office. Assign your office manager with a virtual card to keep track of everything office-related and you’ll never have to worry about it yourself.

Chloé Weitz, office manager for Clac des Doigts, says of Qonto’s virtual cards:

‘The advantage of virtual cards is to have a certain number of cards, while avoiding as much as possible losses, theft, etc. Their management is easier for remote staff.’

Allocating expenses and budgets for projects, team members, and business trips is easier than ever with virtual cards and Instant Cards. When you set a budget on a virtual card or an Instant card, new purchases exceeding that budget will automatically be declined. You can also set virtual cards for purchasing certain kinds of items, e.g. SaaS subscriptions or paid search.