Why B2B Card Programs Are Hard to Scale, and How to Ramp Up

By Malte Rau, CEO and co-founder, Pliant

Published on May 5th, 2026 in Payments

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Banks have spent years modernizing digital account opening, payments interfaces, and customer experience. But in B2B cards, innovation has slowed, even as demand for more flexible commercial card programs continues to rise.

Key insight: The reason is not a lack of technology. It is the underlying economics of building and operating these programs at scale.

For banking providers, this has immediate strategic implications. Institutions that want to compete more effectively in commercial cards need to revisit how they evaluate build-versus-buy decisions, post-transaction complexity, and the types of clients their current infrastructure can realistically support.

Need to Know:

Demand for modern B2B card programs continues to grow, but the pace of innovation has slowed because the economics are more challenging than many institutions expected.
The biggest cost drivers in B2B cards often appear after the transaction — in reconciliation, controls, approvals, and integration with companies’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
Build-versus-buy is often framed as a technology decision, but in practice it is an economics decision that shapes long-term scalability.
Consumer-first card infrastructure often struggles to support the operational demands of multi-entity, cross-border and enterprise B2B use cases.
Banks that want to compete in this market need to evaluate card strategy based on lifecycle cost and operating complexity, not launch speed alone.

The Real Bottleneck is Economics, Not Demand

Demand for more flexible commercial card programs is not the problem. Businesses continue to ask for virtual cards, dynamic controls, and more configurable payment tools, especially as finance teams try to tighten oversight and modernize workflows.

The more difficult reality is that many institutions underestimate what it actually costs to support those capabilities in a B2B environment. In many cases, the challenge begins long before the first card is issued.

Why it matters: Banks can no longer assume that customer demand and modern application programming interfaces (APIs) are enough to make a B2B card strategy viable. The economics must work over the full lifecycle of the program.

What banking leaders should do:

Reassess whether current card strategy assumptions are based on launch costs or full lifecycle costs.
Evaluate the operational burden tied to compliance, servicing and post-transaction workflows before expanding product scope.
Pressure-test expected economics against realistic transaction volume and adoption timelines.
Separate market demand from business viability when evaluating new commercial card initiatives.

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Build versus Buy is Often the Wrong Framing

Once institutions recognize the realistic cost of launching a B2B card program, the conversation typically shifts to whether to build infrastructure internally or rely on third-party providers.

It’s not a simple choice. In practice, both paths introduce tradeoffs that become more visible over time.

Buying can accelerate time to market, but costs tend to increase as transaction volume grows and additional integrations are required.
Building internally offers more control, but only if the institution can absorb the upfront investment and sustain the operational burden over the long term.

The result is that many programs that appear efficient at launch become more expensive and complex as they scale.

Consumer-First Infrastructure Doesn’t Translate Cleanly to B2B

Much of the card infrastructure in the U.S. was designed around consumer use cases, where the transaction marks the end of the customer journey. Once the payment is completed, most of the complexity sits behind the scenes.

Key insight: In B2B environments, the opposite is true. The transaction is often the beginning of a much longer process that includes categorization, approvals, reconciliation and integration into accounting and ERP systems.

This is where many programs start to break down.

Infrastructure designed for consumer simplicity often struggles to support the layered operational requirements of business finance teams. What works well for individual spending does not always extend to multi-entity organizations with approval workflows, audit requirements, and cross-border considerations.

A single business card can generate dozens of transactions that must be reconciled and categorized.
Finance teams require controls, approval chains, and reporting that go far beyond consumer use cases.
Integration with accounting and ERP systems becomes a core requirement, not an add-on.

For banks, this creates a structural challenge: Improving the user experience is not enough if the underlying system cannot support the operational realities of business spending.

Complexity Shows Up Fastest in Multi-Entity and Cross-Border Clients

Not all business customers experience these challenges in the same way. For smaller or more centralized organizations, basic card functionality may be sufficient for a long time.

But for more complex businesses, the limitations of card infrastructure become visible very quickly.

Companies operating across multiple entities, jurisdictions or currencies encounter these issues earlier and more acutely. What begins as a payment tool quickly becomes a system that must support governance, reporting and financial control across an entire organization.

Multi-entity businesses need granular controls that align with corporate structures, including entity-level limits and approval hierarchies.
International companies must manage cross-border payments, foreign currency exposure, and varying regulatory requirements.
Regulated industries and enterprise clients require auditability, policy enforcement, and consistent reporting across all transactions.

For these clients, card infrastructure is part of the financial control framework, not a convenience feature.

This is often where banks see the gap between what their card programs were designed to handle and what their most valuable customers actually need.

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What Banks Should Change in Their B2B Card Strategy Now

As businesses demand more control, visibility and flexibility in how they manage spending, the strategic importance of commercial card programs is increasing.

Banks must rethink how these programs are structured, evaluated and scaled:

Shift from launch metrics to lifecycle economics. Time to market matters, but long-term cost, servicing requirements, and operational complexity matter more.
Reevaluate where operational complexity sits. Most of the cost in B2B cards emerges after the transaction, not at the point of payment.
Segment clients based on infrastructure needs, not just revenue. Multi-entity, cross-border and regulated clients require fundamentally different capabilities than smaller businesses, but there’s more to stratification than raw numbers.
Treat card programs as infrastructure, not features. Cards are increasingly embedded in procurement, finance and accounting workflows, not just used for payments.
Be deliberate about partner and platform decisions. Flexibility and adaptability will matter more than feature breadth as requirements evolve.

The broader shift underway is more about aligning product design with the economic and operational realities of B2B payments versus adding new features.

Banks that recognize this early will be better positioned to support more complex clients and build programs that scale sustainably. Those that do not may find that their card offerings become harder to extend, more expensive to operate, and less competitive over time.