BMO and Extend Bring Virtual Card Distribution and Better Spend Management Capabilities to North American Commercial Clients

• BMO is the first organization to partner with Extend in Canada
• Partnership gives clients rapid onboarding and offers customizable Extend API to help grow business through payment innovation

TORONTO, Dec. 7, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - BMO and Extend, a virtual card and spend management platform, today announced the addition of a simple and powerful set of payments functionality to BMO Corporate Cards. Through its existing relationship with Mastercard, BMO Commercial Bank clients across North America can now use Extend's mobile and desktop app to create, send, and manage virtual cards for simplified payment and reconciliation processes.

BMO is the first organization to work with Extend in Canada and will make Extend solutions available to all Corporate Card clients across North America. Extend provides an opportunity for clients to deploy secure virtual cards from their existing Corporate Card program, without any technical integration, in as little as five minutes.

Juniper Research reports charge volume on virtual cards is expected to more than triple in the next four years, with business payments accounting for most of the spending. The control, efficiency, and flexibility of virtual cards solves many of the spend management challenges businesses face. With Extend, Corporate Card clients can seamlessly empower their employees with virtual cards to pay vendors, track spending by creating different cards for different expense categories, automate reconciliation to simplify bookkeeping, and more – all from the Corporate Card program they already use.

"Our Corporate Card clients want to keep their spending secure and controlled, while reducing costs," said Derek Vernon, Head of Product Management and Enterprise Payments Modernization, BMO Commercial Bank. "The Extend for BMO app solves this critical need with the power of virtual cards that retain all the benefits our clients already enjoy with their Corporate Card program while helping them make real financial progress."

In addition to an easy-to-use mobile app and extensive desktop features, the Extend API gives tech-savvy Corporate Card clients an onramp to payment innovation. Clients can leverage easy configuration and open documentation to integrate virtual card issuance and management directly into their systems and existing workflows. Instant transaction matching, strict security controls, and support for high-volume transactions allow clients to streamline finance processes and optimize core business functions with a flexible virtual card API.

"Mastercard is committed to empowering businesses with flexible and secure virtual payment solutions that grant more control over spending while helping to alleviate the headache of disjointed expense processes," said Darrell MacMullin, Senior Vice President, Products and Platforms at Mastercard Canada. "By delivering rich virtual card capabilities, BMO is leveraging the value of the existing Mastercard-Extend partnership for the benefit of its small and medium-sized business clients across North America."

Extend CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Jamison said, "Too often, teams try to manage and track miscellaneous spend by sharing physical Corporate Cards. This leads to cumbersome expense reports, manual reconciliation, unattributed spend, or card misuse. By giving BMO's clients an easy way to extend the features of their existing Corporate Cards, BMO is bringing the future of spend management to business users today."

Extend's virtual card and spend management platform offers BMO clients the ability to:

• Control vendor payments
• Manage receipts, recurring expenses, and subscriptions
• Create, modify, send, and cancel virtual cards in real-time
• Set spending limits, expiration dates, and recurring rules

BMO is paving the way as a digitally enabled, future-ready bank harnessing the potential of emerging technologies for real-time information and processing. This agreement represents another milestone in BMO's Digital First journey, and builds on the bank's recently announced partnerships with FISPAN and Xero.

To learn more, visit www.paywithextend.com//bmo

Serving customers for 200 years and counting, BMO is a highly diversified financial services provider - the 8th largest bank, by assets, in North America. With total assets of $1.14 trillion as of October 31, 2022, and a team of diverse and highly engaged employees, BMO provides a broad range of personal and commercial banking, wealth management and investment banking products and services to more than 12 million customers and conducts business through three operating groups: Personal and Commercial Banking, BMO Wealth Management and BMO Capital Markets.

Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses realize their greatest potential. Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.

Extend helps banks innovate like fintechs, so SMBs get a simple, powerful way to streamline spend management while keeping the financial partners they know and trust. Thousands of companies use Extend's spend management and virtual card distribution platform to empower their teams, improve core financial processes, and manage billions of dollars in transactions. Extend was founded in 2017 by industry veterans of American Express, Capital One, and other Fortune 500 companies. For more information visit paywithextend.com or follow Extend on LinkedIn. 

SOURCE BMO Financial Group