Intesa Sanpaolo and Mastercard presented Smart Control, a solution for B2B payments in the world of procurement and corporate working capital.
The collaboration between Intesa Sanpaolo's Global Transaction Banking Department and Mastercard aims to optimize payments and simplify accounting, financial and reconciliation processes for B2B payments.
Smart Control is based on a digital platform of generation of virtual credit cards Mastercard, through which a company can pay its suppliers and take advantage of the benefits associated with credit card transactions, including greater payment security, transaction and workflow control, the possibility of automated data reconciliation thanks to data enrichment and improvement of cash flows.
“In Italy, 17% of payments between companies are still made in cash, against a European average of 10%. Transactions between large companies make up 49% of the total, with 33% of their business entirely devoted to cross-border trade. In the last year in Italy there has been a drop in commercial payments of 5%, due - as in the rest of Europe - to the pandemic crisis, but the estimates of the Kaiser Associates observatory for Mastercard foresee a growth of 24% in the next three years,” the companies explain in a joint statement.
Smart Control aims at optimize payments on three fronts:
- in the process, thanks to the possibility of differentiating the approval levels also based on the amount requested, adhering to company policies and procedures;
- in data management, thanks to the possibility of adding various additional fields for each virtual card generated and the integration with company ERPs, it improves times and reduces costs related to the reconciliation between invoices and payments;
- in capital management, thanks to the possibility of increasing the average payment days (DPO), it acts as an additional lever to achieve the objectives of optimizing working capital.
Michael Centemero, country manager of Mastercard in Italy commented: “We know that managing corporate expenses is a delicate and precise task on which the future and profitability of a company itself may also depend, but which still has serious inefficiencies. Thanks to Smart Control, Italian companies will be able to make their payment processes more efficient so as to be able to invest time and resources more productively within the company”.
Stephen Favale, head of the Global Transaction Banking Department, IMI Corporate & Investment Banking Division of Intesa Sanpaolo: "The management of supply chains represents a fundamental asset and a development opportunity for companies that find themselves having to operate in a constantly evolving market: it becomes therefore it is essential to optimize working capital along the entire supply chain and to automate one's procurement processes. Intesa Sanpaolo, which has always been attentive to the needs of businesses, makes all this possible for the domestic market thanks to its collaboration with Mastercard, facilitating the activities of CFOs, Treasurers and Purchasing Managers with Smart Control".
