The Case for Virtual Cards Just Got Stronger, But So Did the Fine Print
Virtual card volume keeps climbing — though whose numbers you trust depends on how much. Juniper Research pegged global virtual card volume at $6.8 trillion by 2026. Two years later, the same research house revised its trajectory to $13.8 trillion by 2028. That's not a rounding error. It's a market where the forecasters keep having to catch up to the growth.
That's not a rounding error. It's a market where measurement still hasn't caught up to adoption.
But the interesting story isn't how fast virtual cards are growing. It's what's changing underneath the growth.
Javelin Strategy & Research mapped this territory in a May 2026 report, identifying five forces driving virtual card adoption. We see four of them as structural shifts that could fundamentally change how virtual cards fit into B2B payments. The fifth? We think it belongs in a different category.
Four Forces Are Doing the Real Work
Better data is finally catching up to the promise. Network data mandates are pushing Level III card data toward the accuracy and completeness AP teams have wanted for years. Better line-item detail means payments can more reliably auto-match to invoices instead of landing in a reconciliation queue.
This has been a quiet blocker on virtual card ROI for a long time. As the data improves, one of the most persistent objections — great, but our team still has to chase the remittance information — becomes much less relevant.
Embedding is what makes usage durable. A virtual card issued as a one-off decision tends to remain a one-off decision. Embed virtual cards directly into ERP and AP workflows, and they become policy-driven, repeatable spend — part of how payables operates rather than another tool someone has to remember to use.
The next step is contextual issuing: an approved expense automatically generates a single-use card number that expires when the transaction clears. That's a materially different risk and reconciliation posture from a physical or shared card sitting in someone's wallet for a year.
And this shift takes time. BILL's René Lacerte noted in a McKinsey interview that virtual card and international payment products took years to mature on its platform. The challenge isn't simply the payment technology; it's understanding what a B2B transaction is actually for. Better data and deeper workflow integration are what begin to solve that problem.
Pricing is about to get more honest — or more contested. Flat-rate interchange pricing is easier to defend when neither side has enough data to question it. As transaction history becomes richer and more transparent, buyers, suppliers, and issuers can see more clearly where the economic value is landing.
Expect those pricing conversations to get sharper.
AI could start choosing the payment rail. Javelin calls this “agentic orchestration”: AI evaluating a transaction's economics, controls, timing, and data requirements and determining when a virtual card makes more sense than ACH or wire.
That's a more consequential use of AI than the fraud-detection capabilities dominating many vendor pitches today. When evaluating platforms, buyers should distinguish between AI that helps process a payment and AI that can intelligently determine how the payment should be made in the first place.
Where We Part Ways With Javelin
Javelin identifies a fifth force: macroeconomic pressure. Higher funding costs and supply-chain shocks can make the virtual card value proposition more attractive because buyers can extend payment timing while suppliers receive faster, more certain cash.
The mechanism is real. We just wouldn't put it in the same category as the other four.
Macroeconomic pressure is cyclical. It strengthens and fades with interest rates, credit conditions, and the economic environment. Better data standards, embedded workflows, increasingly transparent pricing, and intelligent payment orchestration are structural. Once established, they don't simply disappear when the rate cycle changes.
That distinction matters.
If you're trying to determine where to invest — or which capabilities will still matter several years from now — separating structural change from a cyclical tailwind is far more useful than putting all five under the same “forces driving adoption” umbrella.
There's another reason the distinction matters: the macroeconomic argument is already central to the virtual card sales pitch. Buyers get more time to pay. Suppliers get paid faster. Everyone benefits.
But as virtual card volume increases and pricing comes under greater scrutiny, the more interesting question is who actually captures the economic value on either side of that transaction.
That's worth considerably more scrutiny than the standard sales narrative usually invites.
The Bottom Line
Virtual card growth is real. But volume isn't the most important story in 2026.
The bigger shift is happening underneath it: better transaction data, deeper workflow integration, more scrutiny of pricing, and the possibility that AI will increasingly determine which payment rail makes the most sense transaction by transaction.
Those changes could make virtual cards substantially more useful. They could also make their economics much easier to examine.
And that's where buyers should focus.
Rather than taking an issuer's rebate math at face value, organizations evaluating a virtual card program should be asking to see the transaction-level economics: where the value is created, where it is captured, and whether the program still makes sense once the incentives are fully visible.
Point Monarch provides vendor-neutral advisory on payments infrastructure, platform selection, and cost optimization — never paid by the platforms we evaluate.
Sources: Hugh Thomas, "The Virtual Economy: Five Forces Driving Virtual Card Adoption in 2026," Javelin Strategy & Research, May 2026. René Lacerte, interviewed in "Bringing digital to B2B payments," McKinsey & Company, January 2025. Barnali Pal Sinha, "The Rise of Embedded Virtual Card Issuing: How Fintechs Are Reshaping B2B Spending in 2026," Global Banking & Finance Review, April 2026. Juniper Research, "Virtual Card Transaction Values to Increase by 370% Globally in Five Years," June 2021. Juniper Research, "Virtual Card Spend to Reach $13.8 Trillion Globally by 2028," November 2023. Ben Dwyer, "Understanding Level 3 Credit Card Processing and Enhanced Data," CardFellow.
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