How Has COVID Affected Commercial Credit Cards?

Prior to the onset of the pandemic, the commercial credit card market for mid to large corporates in North America had been in a reasonably strong growth mode for several years, with a similar trajectory expected going forward in the following few years. As COVID-related lockdown policies were generally instituted in all regions, with accompanying restrictions on inbound international travel, the challenge was figuring out just how badly corporate card spend would be impacted and the scope of spillover effects on other payments from business slowdowns. As it turned out, the overall U.S. full-year GDP decline was relatively mild and as of Q1 2021, output had exceeded $22 trillion, suggesting a relatively fast, V-curve recovery. Accelerated digital payments adoption by corporates saddled by work-from-home scenarios and industry concentration on purchasing cards and non-travel virtual cards helped to ameliorate disastrous overall card payment declines. Mercator Advisory Group’s latest research report, Commercial Credit Cards: North America Market Review and Forecast, 2019-2025 provides a review of the commercial credit card markets in Canada and the United States, including an analysis of how the pandemic impacted 2020 spend, as well as recovery expectations through 2025.

“The good news for the industry in North America, especially the United States, is that the movement towards expanded use cases for cards in accounts payable created a substantial offsetting balance to the negative effects of lost travel spend,” commented Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service, author of the report, “and this shift has occurred over time, setting the industry up for returned growth during the coming five years.”

This report is 15 pages long and has 6 exhibits.

Companies mentioned in this report include: American Express, Bank of Canada, Bank for International Settlements, Barclays, Billtrust, Boost, Bureau of Economic Analysis, CipherTrace, Conferma Pay, Federal Reserve, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, HSBC, Kabbage, Mastercard, Nacha, Payments Canada, and Visa.