Visa presses into B2B payments by targeting fleet and travel verticals

Visa is moving to deepen its footprint in business-to-business payments by targeting specific verticals, including trucking fleet and online travel agencies, where payment workflows have historically been “closed loop” and heavily manual. Speaking at an investor conference, Chris Newkirk, Visa’s president of commercial and money movement solutions, said the company sees opportunity in parts of the B2B market that have been slow to adopt consumer-like payment experiences and real-time controls. The strategy is built around expanding Visa’s configurability for commercial pay solutions, rather than trying to replace every incumbent at once.

Visa’s starting point is market size. The company estimated the global B2B payments market at $145 trillion, with trucking related payments representing about $1.4 trillion within that broader segment. Visa’s pitch to fleets, Newkirk said, is that Visa’s “open loop” system can let drivers pay not only for fuel but also for other services such as meals and accommodations, while potentially giving fleets access to Visa’s broader fraud protections and digital-wallet capabilities. The alternative today is often a “closed loop” model, where fleet payment programs rely on agreements with specific merchants and cards that can only be used inside that partner network.

Fleet payment is an arena with specialized providers, including Wex and Corpay (formerly Fleetcor). Newkirk told attendees that rivals in this market tend to run closed-loop arrangements designed around core needs like fueling, along with tracking and reporting to help fleets manage drivers and vehicles. He argued that closed-loop systems create both a technological and commercial ceiling for fleets that want to add broader spend categories or integrate more easily into day-to-day workflows. By contrast, Visa’s approach for fleet programs emphasizes adjustable controls and reporting, and can support configurations that allow cards and virtual payments to function across more of the Visa acceptance footprint.

Visa’s fleet roadmap includes Visa Fleet 2.0, a program positioned as an “industry standard” for fleet controls and reporting. The company says Fleet 2.0 enhances controls and reporting with more than 20 classifications, adjustable authorization levels, and expanded data capacity (with full features subject to regional availability). Visa also describes fleet capabilities that combine security features, category controls, and real-time dashboards, and it frames the product as adaptable to closed-loop, open-loop, or hybrid programs. In Europe, Visa has promoted Fleet 2.0 as part of its broader “Ready for Fleet” ecosystem, launching the program with 15 partners in September 2025.

On the payments control side, Visa is also promoting B2B services that are designed to give issuers and commercial clients more authorization-based spend protection. Visa B2B Payables is described as a suite for paying approved invoices and making on-demand payments, delivered through the Visa Commercial Solutions, or VCS, Hub and via APIs, and supported by a virtual card engine that can issue unique virtual card numbers per transaction. Separately, Visa B2B Payment Controls is presented as an API-based rules engine that lets customers define when, where, how, and for how much accounts can be used, with monitoring, notifications, and supplier-validation capabilities intended to reduce fraud and misuse.

Visa is not limiting its B2B push to transportation. Newkirk also pointed to online travel agencies as another vertical where payment processes can be complex, particularly around supplier payments. According to the same conference remarks, Visa is providing services intended to help travel firms manage supplier payments more effectively, and Visa previously won ’s online travel agency business. Visa also cited expanded work with related to the supplier-payment area. In practice, the underlying goal is similar to the fleet strategy: reduce operational friction in payments that currently depend on reconciliation work and manual handling.

Visa’s commercial leadership is also tying the vertical focus to a broader technology shift, arguing that AI-enabled automation could change B2B payments by reducing the manual effort involved in invoicing, reconciliation, and chasing down payments. Newkirk said B2B payments today are “manual and fragmented” and that agentic systems could streamline parts of the workflow over time. Still, competitive dynamics appear mixed. In an email reaction reported by Payments Dive, Baird analyst David Koning said he does not expect Visa to materially disrupt the fleet market in the near term, partly because closed-loop providers likely have only a relatively small share of fleets’ total spend and many fleets already use Visa cards.

What Visa did not disclose in the reported remarks is how quickly it expects vertical strategies to translate into measurable volume, or which specific U.S. or regional deployments will come first. The company also did not provide public details on partner-by-partner economics or timelines for replacing or expanding existing fleet cards and travel supplier-payment workflows. For now, the most concrete indicates are the product direction, including B2B Payables, B2B Payment Controls, and Fleet 2.0, and the emphasis on opening up spending categories that have historically been constrained by closed-loop partnerships. Investors and industry participants will likely watch for further announcements tying those products to named deployments and measurable commercial-payment momentum.