Chinese cross-border payment company Payful has launched six virtual Visa charge-card products through its Hong Kong subsidiary after upgrading its issuing infrastructure with BPC.
The programme covers purchasing, corporate travel and credit-related spending, with each card linked directly to funds held in a merchant’s settlement account at Payful. This enables businesses to use their existing balances for supplier invoices and employee expenses without first transferring the money to an external wallet.
Payful connected its core banking system to BPC’s SmartVista platform through CBSGate APIs. The implementation also includes real-time transaction notifications, adaptive fraud scoring and 3D Secure 2.0 authentication.
Building an issuing operation within a year
Payful selected BPC’s Card Management as a Service model as it sought to expand its issuing capabilities without developing the full processing environment internally. The company said it configured the six Visa products without custom coding and established the upgraded issuing operation within a year.
Ben Wang, general manager of the Card Business Unit within Payful’s International Division, said: “With BPC’s support, we’ve built a future-proven issuing business within a year. Merchants can now sort their settlement funds through Visa credentials, simplifying supplier payments and employee travel while keeping fraud in check.”
Payful plans to introduce the model in export markets across Oceania, Europe and the Americas.
Virtual cards gain ground in business payments
Payful’s launch comes as virtual cards take a larger role in business payments. Juniper Research expects global B2B virtual card payments to reach $14.6 trillion by 2029, accounting for 83% of the total virtual card market. The research company valued the overall market at $5.2 trillion in 2025.
Research commissioned by Mastercard also found that nearly 80% of small and medium-sized businesses globally had adopted virtual cards in some form. Use remains concentrated in accounts payable, travel and expenses, and spending delegated to employees, closely matching the areas covered by Payful’s new products.
Wider adoption still presents operational difficulties. Visa said in May that fragmented supplier connections, manual reconciliation and inconsistent payment flows continue to make virtual card programmes difficult to scale. Payment companies and card networks are consequently working to connect card issuance more closely with supplier acceptance, invoices and account systems.
SmartVista supports wider payment projects
Payful’s virtual card programme forms part of a broader range of SmartVista deployments across card issuing, transaction processing and national payment infrastructure.
Pakistan’s HABIBMETRO Bank recently selected the platform to upgrade its issuing and transaction-processing operations, which currently handle more than 3.25 million transactions a day. The bank plans to use SmartVista to support physical and virtual cards, tokenisation, scheme certifications, Google Pay and integrations with fintechs, bill aggregators and remittance companies.
In Ethiopia, the BPC-powered EthioPay-IPS platform processed more than one million transactions in a single day, with a combined value exceeding ETB 5 billion. Operated by national payment switch EthSwitch, the platform supports account and wallet transfers, interoperable QR payments, request to pay and recurring payments.
While the HABIBMETRO and EthSwitch projects involve larger banking and national payment environments, Payful is using the technology to support a managed card programme that it intends to take into further markets.
Nikhil Gujral, head of sales for Asia-Pacific at BPC, said Payful’s cloud implementation would enable the company to extend the card programme into additional regions following its Hong Kong launch.
“Payful needed a partner who would allow them to innovate at fintech speed,” said Gujral. “Our cloud-native microservices architecture allowed that and offered Payful the ability to scale the programme to new jurisdictions whenever they are ready following the Hong Kong debut.”
