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Companies can quickly provide access to a corporate card as well as set spending limits and expiration dates.

To help companies support their employees working from home, or site leaders tasked with re-opening offices, factories, and stores with the procurement of home office equipment or essential PPE and cleaning supplies, U.S. Bank has launched a new corporate card that can be sent directly to a mobile wallet.*

With U.S. Bank Instant Card™, through a completely digital process, managers can quickly provide access to a corporate card via the Instant Card app, saving authorized users from having to use personal spend, and employers from having to process the back-end paperwork.

“As soon as the COVID-19 crisis began and our customers began implementing their various work-from-home guidelines, they started reaching out to us,” said Bradley Matthews, senior vice president for the Corporate Payments group at U.S. Bank. “They needed a tool for their suddenly remote staff to make purchases without having to use personal credit cards.”

Matthews said that Instant Card will be used for expenses such as remote staff or contractors needing supplies to set up/maintain home offices, pull permits to keep construction projects or utility field crews moving forward, open new facilities or simply as a means for replacing petty cash. 

Many remote workers don’t have company credit cards and are often asked to pay for business expenses, and the traditional, manual payment methods like checks or ACH often require workplace access or multiple manager signatures to complete transactions. 

The U.S. Bank Instant Card uses the same technology as U.S. Bank Expense Wizard™, which the bank rolled out in 2019 to help customers manage the payment and expense reporting challenges presented by infrequent travelers. With Expense Wizard, U.S. Bank was the first bank to push a virtual credit card directly to a user’s mobile wallet, and that same proprietary technology has been incorporated into Instant Card.

With a few simple steps, a company can send an Instant Card to anyone in the organization needing to make purchases. Funds are available for immediate use and remote users have the added comfort of contactless payment, an especially important consideration right now. 

To protect against fraud or misuse, the company can control how and when funds are used by establishing card spending limits and expiration dates and can readily review all employee transactions online, via the bank’s management reporting tool.

“Providing a contactless and digital experience for our business customers is imperative right now,” Matthews added. “And we’re quite certain that it will be going forward.”