Mastercard gives card issuers AI scores to find suppliers who will take cards over checks

Mastercard's announcement of Advanced B2B Analytics ^[1] puts the payoff in its opening lines: issuers "can now drive commercial card spend at scale, capture additional revenues and help corporate clients identify opportunities to optimize working capital" ^[13]. Working capital comes third. The company sizes the addressable B2B payments opportunity at about $80 trillion ^[2]. "We believe there's an $80 trillion opportunity to help corporates and small businesses re-engineer the way payments are made today between buyers and suppliers," Marc Pettican, Mastercard's global head of Corporate Solutions ^[10], told American Banker ^[11]. Mastercard did not say how much of that pool it expects to reach a card, what issuers pay for the tool, or what it earns on the spend that converts ^[1][2]. Each percentage point of the $80 trillion that does move is about $800 billion of payments ^[21].

The pitch to both sides of the invoice is about timing. Invoices typically carry 30-, 60- or 90-day terms ^[18]. Pettican said that when buyers move a supplier payment to a card product, they generate a working capital benefit, and that makes it very powerful from the buyer's perspective. "It's also very attractive to the supplier because the supplier potentially can get paid earlier than the terms that they're accepting," he said ^[17]. Aaron McPherson, principal at AFM Consulting, gave a reason besides settlement speed: card payments come with a whole structure for disputing a transaction that a wire does not have, he told American Banker ^[20].

The tool goes after the cost of finding suppliers who will switch. According to the release, issuers and corporate buyers lack an insight-driven way to pick which suppliers to approach, and fragmented data and manual processes slow conversion ^[15]. The fix is a propensity score that ranks a client's suppliers by how likely each is to accept a card ^[4]. It is built from accounts payable data the client hands to Mastercard ^[6]. Mastercard's own survey figure sets the size of the job. Nearly half of suppliers expect buyers to ask for card payment more often ^[16], so just over half do not ^[22].

Mastercard is building for the buyer's bank first. The supplier and acquirer side is promised for later ^[5], as is a receivables version ^[9]. That sequence puts the first product with the card issuer, the party whose revenue the release names ^[13]. Pettican previewed the receivables pitch with a late-payment figure. He said over 30% of payments do not hit the terms suppliers afforded, and suppliers get no benefit when a payment turns up late ^[19].

If the first banks move check and ACH volume onto cards, the score becomes a standard sales tool for commercial card issuers. Flagged suppliers could also keep refusing, leaving the product as a payables dashboard. A third path runs through receivables, where Mastercard says it wants to show how often a company chases money it is owed and whether a customer has left it with bad debt ^[9]. I think the first outcome is the one Mastercard built for, given the order it chose and the revenue line it led with. The counter-case comes from the first issuer to speak. Pascalle Albrecht of Absa Business Banking described the partnership in cash-flow terms: it "gives clients a smarter way to understand their payment ecosystems, unlock value across their supplier networks and improve cash flow management," she said ^[12]. If Absa and Emirates NBD report working-capital gains for clients without growth in commercial card volume ^[3], the thesis is wrong.