Commercial Payment Cards: US Market Trends, 13th Edition

Report Overview

US Commercial Cards: A $5.1 Trillion Market by 2027

The report provides a detailed analysis of commercial payment card trends in the US and sizes the method of payment’s global market. Commercial cards are a rapidly growing segment of the payment card market and the finance departments driving use demand seamlessness and evergreen innovation.

Commercial cards in the US and globally have insinuated themselves into corporations by replacing checks and bank wire transfers with dynamic iterations of payment cards. Commercial cards integrated into spend management platforms allow finance departments to almost eliminate fraud and to put the power of corporate purchasing into the hands of more employees while maintaining complete control over how/where/when and dollars spent with payments.

In the US alone, there are 6.2 million employer firms, with 135 million employees, payrolls totaling $8.1 trillion and sales/shipments of $50.3 trillion. These companies spend $13 trillion on procurement, $300 billion on T&E, $304 billion on company fleets and fleet management. We estimate that only half of all employer firms use commercial or corporate cards which means the market size for new cards is 3.2 million firms.

Both commercial cards and Real Time Payments (RTP) are targeting the 3.1 billion checks totaling $8.45 trillion as well as corporate payments made by wire transfer and ACH.

Through 2027, we estimate that US commercial cards will grow at a CAGR within the range of 16.6% to 21.0% while globally, commercial cards will grow to $81.6 trillion by 2027 with a CAGR of 5.0%.

Some of the most dynamic players in corporate payments are firms using expertise mastered over years in specific niches to develop comprehensive corporate spend and payments platforms using virtual payment cards. For instance, Corpay and WEX are the heavyweights of fleet cards and are experts at collecting time and location and buyer and seller details of each transaction. They have both leveraged their competencies with complex transactions to a larger corporate spend landscape.

The new Packaged Facts report, Commercial Payment Cards: US Market Trends, 13th Edition, profiles each of the largest players and platforms in the commercial card payments sector with a focus on both the market opportunity of the space as well as the barriers to widespread adoption faced by virtual cards.

Scope

In this report, we size the commercial card market both internationally and in the US with a break-out for each card type subsumed under the category. Additionally, we provide a forecast for global and US commercial card growth to 2027.

Within the commercial card industry, product line extensions are a key driver of adoption and revenue as is the continuing displacement of legacy payment products, principally checks.

While there are bank specific products entering the commercial payments space (e.g., real time payments), to date they have principally succeeded in reinvigorating commercial card innovators and spurring development of technology solutions that will keep commercial cards solidly growing for the foreseeable future.

Methodology

Secondary research for the report includes general business and trade publications, management consulting reports, investment analyst reports, company financial filings, and vendor-generated survey findings. Research also relied on US and international governmental and non-profit and not-for-profit trade reports, country profiles, and payment system analysis.

Within the report, additional surveys from other market research firms as well as commercial card providers are referenced and cited.