Tag: Visa

Coast raises $92 million in new capital, partners with Visa to expand financial tools and software for modern business fleets

NEW YORK, March 21, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Coast, which offers a simple and smart way for companies in the United States to manage fuel and fleet spending, today announced it has raised $92 million in new funding. The round includes $25 million in equity capital led by existing investors, including BoxGroup, Avid Ventures, Accel, Insight Partners, and Better Tomorrow Ventures, as well as new investor Vesey Ventures. The company also secured $67 million in committed debt capital from Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital.

For the nearly one million American businesses that collectively operate around 40 million vehicles in their commercial fleets – including field service businesses like HVAC, plumbing, landscaping, pest control, construction, government fleets and long-haul trucking – managing expenses in the field is a major challenge. Over the decades, a handful of now very large incumbent payment solutions have emerged to serve fleet-operating companies’ needs with fuel cards, to allow fleet managers to set field-specific controls, like restricting purchases to only fuel products, or tracking expenses on a per-vehicle basis. The fleet fuel payments on these specialized cards add up to a staggering $120 billion annually in the US.

Coast, led by founder and CEO Daniel Simon, reimagines the fleet payments product category, enabled by mobile technology and state-of-the-art vehicle data and telematics.

Coast’s software gives fleet managers powerful policies and controls that they can tailor to the on-the-job needs of different employees and vehicles in their fleets. It uses real-time information that employee drivers provide through their phones, as well as data from the onboard computers of company

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Alaska Airlines Visa Business card review

Alaska Airlines Visa® Business card overview

The Alaska Airlines Visa® Business card is an easily overlooked card that earns valuable airline miles. It has a low annual fee and lucrative ongoing perks for travelers loyal to Alaska Airlines. Card rating*: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

* Card rating is based on the opinion of TPG’s editors and is not influenced by the card issuer.

Alaska Airlines has one of the best airline loyalty programs in the world, which makes the Alaska Airlines Visa Business card a surprisingly valuable credit card to carry.

Alaska Airlines is a part of the Oneworld alliance and has an exclusive partnership with American Airlines, meaning Alaska miles can be useful on more than just the airline itself. Some of the award prices to fly the airline’s partners are outstanding, like flights to Asia from 70,000 miles in Cathay Pacific or Japan Airlines first class.

If you don’t already have an Alaska Airlines cobranded credit card, you might want to think about picking one up.

Here’s a closer look at this card and why you might want to consider applying for it.

Alaska Airlines Visa Business welcome offer

With the Alaska Airlines Business, you’ll get 50,000 bonus miles and Alaska’s Famous Companion Fare ($99 fare plus taxes and fees from $23) after making $3,000 or more in purchases within the first 90 days of opening your account.

TPG pegs Alaska miles at 1.4 cents each, making these miles worth $700.

WALLACE COTTON/THE POINTS GUY

Maximizing the Companion Fare part of the introductory offer can save a few hundred dollars more. This companion certificate is valid on all Alaska Airlines flights; you pay just $99 plus the taxes and fees for a companion who is booked on the same round-trip economy reservation as you.

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Expend Integrates Visa Business Card Transactions Into Expense Management Platform

London-based Expend has integrated Visa Business Card transactions into its spend and expense management platform.

With this new Expend Card Connect feature, Visa Business Card debit and credit transactions can be passed into the Expend app in real time, streamlining the processing of business expenses, Expend said in a press release emailed to PYMNTS Tuesday (June 20).

“Expend Card Connect allows businesses to immediately see purchases made on any Visa Business Cards that are connected to Expend and approve them for filing into their company accounts,” Expend CEO Johnny Vowles said in the release.

This feature saves companies the time that would be spent processing expense purchases, eliminates the errors that can occur when data is input manually and gives companies real-time visibility of costs, according to the release.

“Expend Card Connect continues our mission to improve real-time visibility and zero-touch processing of personal expenses and answers a pressing customer need,” Vowles said in the release.

PYMNTS research has found that as recently as 2021, one-third of businesses were still managing their expenses with manual processes.

These processes required employees to fill out and submit paper forms and checks, required business partners to handle paper invoices and checks, and required the companies themselves to keep tabs on the multitude of forms and files, according to the “Corporate Spend Playbook,” a PYMNTS and Airbase collaboration.

The report also found that digitizing these paper-based processes can help rein in the inefficiencies that are inherent in these methods.

In another recent development in the spend and expense management space, Medius said June 7 that it plans to acquire Expensya to add Expensya’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, mobile-first employee spend management solutions to Medius’ accounts payable (AP) platform.

About a month earlier, on May 2, Fyle and Intuit QuickBooks partnered on

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Visa and MasterCard agree to lower average credit card interchange fee below 1%

The government has announced new details of an agreement with Visa and MasterCard that will see them lower the amount that they charge retailers when a customer pays for a purchase with a credit card.

Known as so-called interchange fees, they have long irritated merchants by allowing the credit card company to keep a percentage of every sale, instead of a flat fee for each transaction.

On Thursday, the government announced a deal with the two card companies that will reduce interchange fees for in-store transactions to 0.95 per cent, on average.

That means on a $100 purchase, if a customer pays with a credit card, the retailer will get at least $99, where they previously would have kept as little as $97 in some cases.

A government release says on average, the deal will reduce the typical fee that a merchant pays by 27 per cent. 

The fee reductions are expected to save retailers about $1 billion over five years and “make credit card transactions fairer for small businesses, which have less bargaining power than larger merchants to negotiate lower rates,” the government said in a release.

Many other jurisdictions, including the European Union, the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, China and Malaysia, have capped interchange fees at well under one per cent, but in Canada some cards can charge up to three per cent. Currently, the average interchange fee for a Canadian Visa credit card is 1.4 per cent, Visa says.

Merchants were forbidden from passing those fees on to consumers directly for years, but that all changed last fall when the credit giants agreed to settle a class action lawsuit over the matter, a deal that saw them agree to refund businesses hundreds of millions of dollars for what they charged in interchange fees over the years.

Part

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Visa, Mastercard Beat Earnings: Travel, Cross-Border Outlook Improves

Colossal credit card companies Mastercard (MA) and Visa (V) report earnings results on Thursday. Mastercard topped expectations for its fourth quarter results before the market opened. And Visa kicked off its fiscal 2023 year by beating forecasts for its afternoon report. MA stock fell Thursday and Friday. Visa stock rose on Friday following its announcement.




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A backdrop of rising interest rates can be a positive for the big credit card processors. But those interest rates also squeeze consumers, who have also grown increasingly wary of a possible recession. Wells Fargo analyst Donald Fandetti expects these factors to make most of 2023 a challenging environment for consumer finance company fundamentals, he wrote in a mid-December research note.

However, easing travel-related concerns and revenue other than consumer credit cards is improving company diversification. Also, additional payment flows outside of consumer cards should extend Visa and Mastercard’s growth, KeyBanc analyst Josh Beck noted on Jan. 9.

On Tuesday, MA stock and Visa stock veered sharply higher and lower amid the New York Stock Exchange’s trading malfunction. Both hit “circuit breakers” and were temporarily halted.

Mastercard Earnings

Mastercard’s gross dollar volume grew 14% through the first three quarters of 2022, to $6 trillion. The company’s cross-border volume spiked 51% during the year, generating $4.8 billion in cross-border fees.

For the fourth quarter, Mastercard’s adjusted earnings rose 13% to $2.65 per share on 12% revenue growth to $5.8 billion. That just beat Wall Street expectations of 9.4% earnings growth to $2.57 per share on 10.9% revenue growth to $5.79 billion.

For Q4, gross dollar volume grew 8% to $2.1 trillion. Cross-border payments volume leapt 31% $1.8 billion and transaction processing fees rose 12% to $3.3 billion.

The results mark seven consecutive quarters of increasing earnings and eight quarters of revenue

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