Mesh, Visa usher in post-PAN era

Mesh Payments, a corporate payment solutions provider, in partnership with Visa, unveiled the Plug & Pay Visa business card on March 2, 2022, a hybrid payment card solution designed to protect cardholder data from fraudsters. The companies described the product as a numberless physical card that supports a hot-swappable virtual card. The platform's additional tools and features give cardholders security, flexibility, control and more ways to pay, they noted.

Oded Zehavi, CEO of Mesh Payments, positioned Plug & Pay as a timely solution that enables finance teams to focus on business priorities rather than corporate card fraud and abuse. "With the Plug & Pay Visa card, businesses can enjoy the security a numberless physical card provides, while still benefiting from the enhanced experience of virtual cards and our spend management platform," he said, adding that innovating with Visa has been a rewarding experience.

Veronica Fernandez, senior vice president, North America head, Visa Business Solutions, stated the Plug & Pay Visa card will help bring market-leading innovations to small and midsize businesses. "The way businesses manage their spend is evolving rapidly due to new innovations and technological solutions," she said. "We want to help our clients adapt to these changes and better serve them by enabling the enhanced experiences new technologies can provide."

Beyond PAN truncation

For decades, payment card issuers have generated unique primary account numbers (PANs) when opening credit card accounts, financial analysts have noted. These numbers, embossed on physical credit cards, identify the card brand, issuing bank and customer, and they have a checksum number at the end for security. Ranging in length between 14 and 19 digits, PANs provide processors with credit, debit, gift and stored-value transaction details at the POS.

For additional security, PANs are truncated on paper and virtual receipts and encrypted when in transit between point of entry at the POS and their arrival at processing host to protect card accounts from hackers. Numberless cards reduce these risks by removing numbers entirely, Mesh and Visa representatives noted, stating that if a physical card is compromised, finance managers can link a new virtual card to the physical card immediately.

Zehavi acknowledged that Plug & Pay is not the first numberless credit card. However, he added, it differs from other market entrants such as Curve and Apple, which do not display numbers on their physical cards but have account numbers linked to card accounts. Alternatively, Plug & Pay users can link their blank physical cards to any virtual card by "plugging in" a virtual card to the platform and instantly swapping the card whenever necessary, he stated.

Finance managers can also use Plug & Pay's centralized platform to disable cards, change PINs and pre-approve virtual cards, Zehavi noted, adding that these features help finance teams manage and shorten bookkeeping with digital receipt management and real-time visibility and insights. "As we see further consumerization of the enterprise, more and more small and medium enterprises are embracing new technologies and experiences," he said.

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