Mercoa
AI Agent for Billpay platforms to pay invoices with virtual cards
TL;DR
Mercoa converts check & ACH payments into virtual card payments. Our CardPay agent knows which vendors accept cards, what fees they charge, and pays them through portals, links, phone, or email.
The Problem
If you process millions of dollars in B2B payouts to vendors, you know virtual cards make money. Our data across 11 BillPay platforms shows that 15-30% of all ACH transactions processed could be paid by card.
When a vendor accepts your virtual card, you make a percent back through interchange. Unfortunately, a majority of AP platforms, procurement software, supply chain systems, and enterprises with card issuing programs pay vendors through ACH & check. This volume is missed interchange revenue.
Today, platforms try capture this revenue by:
1) Asking users to deliver the card themselves
Customers use your BillPay for control over approvals and payment timing. Forcing them to generate virtual cards and key them into vendor portals undermines that control.
For example, Brex BillPay asks users to assign a member of their team to pay a vendor bill using a virtual card.
When you ask your customers to deliver the card themselves, you’re also asking them to figure out if a vendor will accept cards. This is a side quest your users do not want to complete. Your customers end up choosing the path of least resistance (ACH & Check) instead of paying by card.
2) Hiring a vendor enablement team.
The other solution is to hire a vendor enablement team. These teams identify vendors who accept cards, check their fees, and process payments by:
- Logging into portals & manually entering card details
- Calling vendors & reading card details over the phone
- Emailing card details directly to the vendor
This approach is slow, expensive, and impossible to scale without adding more people.
Some platforms hire these teams internally. We spoke with one AP platform that staffs 40 vendor ops employees solely to call vendors or type card numbers into portals by hand.
Others outsource the work to issuer services like FIS, or Corpay. These providers deliver a poor experience, send cards by email without context, and pressure vendors to join a network.
The Mercoa CardPay Agent
Mercoa automates the entire vendor payment workflow; from identifying which vendor will take a card to delivering that card through the right channel.
We do this by:
- Plugging directly into your AP or Bill Pay product. When your customer schedules an invoice, we analyze it in real time and flags if it is cardable and whether fees apply.
- Automating card delivery. On the scheduled date, our agent takes a card (issued by you) logs into the vendor portal, uses the invoice link, or follows the vendor’s required process to submit a virtual card payment. No human involvement is required.
- Providing full confirmation: We return a payment confirmation along with a receipt back to your system so the bill is marked as paid, keeping your workflow intact.
Drop in our agent with 2 API calls and start capturing the margin you are missing today.
Our Agent requires zero changes to your customer experience and works with your card issuing program.
A company using Mercoa can make up to $26k for every $1 Million processed through cards.
How did we get here?
We were building an embedded Bill Pay platform for SaaS companies to offer AP/BillPay to their customers. We launched Bill Pay for 11 platforms in under a year.
While processing their invoices, we kept seeing the same thing:
15–30% of payments could be paid by card with no fee, but weren’t.
The roadblocks were always the same:
- No one knew which vendors would take a card
- What the fee would be,
- How to deliver it without breaking the workflow.
Then bigger AP platforms started calling us. They didn’t want our whole Bill Pay product. They just wanted the part that solved vendor acceptance and delivery.
That’s when we realized the bigger play wasn’t building another AP platform. It was giving every platform and enterprise the ability to turn vendor payments into profits. We’re starting with virtual card payments and see a large opportunity to handle the full vendor enablement journey.
Our Ask:
Are you a platform or enterprise that wants to make more vendor payments through cards? Do you have a vendor ops team that’s drowning in manual work?
We’d love to show you how you can capture more card margin without more ops.
Email sai@mercoa.com or book a demo today!
Mercoa: The accounts payable & BillPay API for B2B fintechs
What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?
We spent all of 2023 building our core product with a select group of core customers. In 2024, we invested in our go-to-market motion and are now growing at 20% month-over-month.
