Mastercard today announced a series of enhancements to Mastercard In Control® – a virtual card number (VCN) platform– reinforcing its position as a global leader in secure, scalable B2B payments.

New innovations include advanced virtual card controls that help reduce risk across the full payment lifecycle, and one scalable connection to Mastercard’s growing embedded partner network — enabling enterprises, financial institutions and platforms to manage payments with greater confidence, flexibility and efficiency.

Mastercard’s VCN ecosystem now includes issuers, direct platforms and corporates transacting across 43 countries and 174 currencies, underscoring its ability to support global expansion while maintaining consistency and oversight.

“As payments become more digitized and embedded into business workflows, expectations for performance, security and control are higher than ever,” said Marc Pettican, Global Head of Corporate Solutions at Mastercard. “We’re expanding our virtual card capabilities to deliver more unified and scalable experiences — helping partners simplify how they implement and scale virtual card programs with greater security, control and consistency.”

As virtual card use grows across industries and regions, Mastercard continues to strengthen security at every stage of a transaction. Mastercard data shows that fraud rates are less than one-fifth on virtual cards compared to non-virtual cards, with that number being even lower when those virtual cards are issued through Mastercard In Control.

Mastercard is building on this with two distinct solutions that improve control across the virtual card lifecycle:

• Issuer Enforced Controls — a new capability — applies at the point of virtual card number creation and allows issuers to set baseline guardrails, such as spend limits, transaction limit caps, and validity periods, helping ensure complaint controls are in place from the start and reducing fraud risk across virtual card programs.
• Clearing Controls — introduced last year, now with new enhancements — extend control validation beyond authorization into the clearing stage. New enhancements enable corporates and platforms to block invalid transactions, apply more precise controls, and better manage payment timing, while supporting centralized policy management as programs scale.

Citi is already live with both Issuer Enforced and Clearing Controls and is expected to be the first issuer to roll out these VCN capabilities globally, later this year.

Together, these capabilities are underpinned by Mastercard’s network-level security, tokenization, and fraud monitoring, complemented by enterprise-grade cybersecurity solutions — delivering stronger, end-to-end protection across every stage of the transaction.

New enhancements to the platform include:

• Expanded card controls, including the ability to apply multiple control sets at the real card level — enabling controls to be enforced across all transactions and associated virtual cards without handling sensitive credentials
• Simplified integration and accelerated access to end-to-end payment capabilities by enabling virtual card creation and payment initiation in one seamless step

These capabilities offer businesses a more consistent way to integrate, control and scale their virtual card programs — helping them reduce operational complexity, accelerate time to value and innovate faster within a single, unified experience.

Since Mastercard launched its embedded VCN program in March 2025, dozens of partners across expense management, ERP and accounts payable systems — as well as travel, hospitality, healthcare and e-commerce platforms — have signed up for a simpler, more unified corporate payment experience. As just one example, SAP recently enabled their partnership through the program – a foundational step in scaling embedded virtual cards.