What is a corporate credit card – and how is it automating business finance?

In today’s digital economy, a corporate credit card is no longer just a convenient way to pay bills. For many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), when used within an all‑in‑one financial platform, a corporate credit card is becoming an important entry point into financial digital transformation – connecting day-to-day spending with real-time data, stronger controls, and more efficient global operations.

When used effectively, a corporate credit card offers several key business advantages:

• Funding and cash flow: It can help finance daily operating costs, such as advertising, inventory, and SaaS subscriptions, as well as manage short-term cash flow needs between paying suppliers and receiving customer payments.

• Visibility and control: It helps align team expenditure with budgets, keeping all financial data visible and traceable for better control.

What is a corporate credit card?

In simple terms, a personal credit card is designed around individual lifestyle and consumption, whereas a corporate credit card is designed around business operations and control.

Corporate credit card vs personal credit card

With a personal credit card, the individual cardholder is responsible for all repayments and the limit is based on their income and personal credit history, with features focused on rewards such as air miles and dining offers. With a corporate credit card, the company is liable to the issuer. The business’s size, cash flow, and, and financial performance determine credit limits, and the product is designed for control and visibility – offering tools for expense categorisation, approval workflows, policy controls, reconciliation and integration with accounting or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Today, a corporate card is increasingly part of a wider spend management platform that helps organisations manage costs and data, rather than simply enabling payments.

Why traditional corporate credit cards are no longer sufficient

For many Hong Kong SMEs, the limitations of traditional bank-issued corporate credit cards are most evident after the payment has been made: administrative workload, delayed visibility, and hidden costs.

Manual and fragmented expense processes

In a traditional process, employees pay with a corporate credit card and are responsible for keeping their own receipts, which often leads to gaps or missing documentation. Finance typically only gets a clear view of spending when the monthly statement arrives, and then has to match each transaction to an employee. As a result, a large proportion of the team’s time is tied up in administration rather than in analysis, planning, and supporting business decisions.

High and opaque cross-border costs

Using a traditional corporate credit card for international or foreign currency payments can become expensive. Beyond the headline exchange rate, businesses may face embedded FX mark-ups, foreign transaction fees, and occasional intermediary bank charges. In practice, this can mean paying 3–5% more than the nominal transaction value. For organisations that pay overseas suppliers or services on a recurring basis, these incremental costs accumulate and can have a material impact on profitability.

Limited real-time visibility and control

Many corporate card programmes are still structured around the month-end statement, which makes it difficult to see in real time whether a particular team, project, or campaign is already over budget. Control options are often fairly basic, making it hard to set detailed limits by user or to restrict specific merchant categories. The gap between when money is spent and when it becomes fully visible increases the risk of overspend and makes proactive budget management more difficult.

How modern corporate cards enable automation and data integration

Airwallex sees the corporate credit card as an integral part of a broader, automated finance infrastructure, not just a standalone product.

With Airwallex, businesses can issue physical or virtual corporate credit cards to employees whenever required. Transactions made are captured on the platform in real time. Once a payment has been made, the employee simply opens the Airwallex mobile app, takes a photo of the receipt, and submits it. Optical character recognition (OCR) then extracts key details, and automatically pre-fills the expense record. The employee needs to only review the information and, where appropriate, apply the correct department, project, or cost centre tag. This significantly reduces reliance on manual expense forms and ad hoc spreadsheets.

Finance teams can set up multi-level approval workflows based on criteria such as transaction value, department and seniority. Expense submissions are automatically routed to the relevant approver and, once approved, the underlying transactions – together with receipt images and tags – can be synchronised directly with accounting systems such as Xero or NetSuite. In practice, this gives finance teams near real-time visibility of company expenditure, while cutting down the manual effort involved in reimbursement, approval, and reconciliation.

Customers including Bowtie have used Airwallex to bring bill payments and corporate card spend onto a single platform, reducing time spent on bookkeeping and freeing finance and operations teams to focus more on supporting growth. 

Simplifying global payments and reducing FX costs

For many SMEs, a major challenge is the cost of foreign currency payments, whether for SaaS subscriptions, digital advertising, overseas suppliers, or international teams. Airwallex corporate credit cards are designed to help contain these cross-border costs. When a card is used, with 0% foreign card transaction fees on HKD/USD expenses and competitive foreign exchange rates, this can materially reduce the cost of overseas payments.

Airwallex Global Accounts allow businesses to manage their foreign currency balances more strategically. Rather than converting funds between HKD/USD on every credit card transaction, they can manage major currencies in one place and convert only when it is commercially favourable, typically at rates close to the interbank rate plus a clear, transparent margin. For organisations with recurring foreign currency spend, this approach can reduce reliance on costly card FX and deliver savings of up to 80% in FX costs compared with traditional banking solutions.

A case in point is Hong Kong virtual insurer Bowtie, which previously used local credit cards to pay for USD-denominated SaaS and other overseas services, incurring higher FX mark-ups and foreign transaction fees. By switching to Airwallex and paying directly in USD, Bowtie reduced its foreign payment costs by around 3–5%, while also shortening the time required each month to process expenses and reconcile accounts.

Three key considerations when choosing a corporate card platform 

Rewards and annual fees still matter, but if a business is serious about financial digital transformation, its choice of corporate card platform should be treated as a decision about its core finance infrastructure rather than simply a way to earn cash rebate or points. In practice, there are three areas that warrant particular attention. 

1. Integration and API capabilities 

A modern corporate card platform should plug directly into your wider finance stack, so it is important to understand how well it integrates with your existing tools and processes. Native connections to major accounting systems such as Xero and NetSuite can remove a significant amount of manual work, while stable, well-documented APIs make it possible to embed collections, payouts, and card spend directly into internal systems and workflows. 

Airwallex is designed with this in mind as a financial operating system: Accounts, foreign exchange, Payments and Corporate Cards are all accessible via API, enabling businesses to start with straightforward plug-in integrations and progressively move towards deeper automation as their needs evolve. 

2. Pricing transparency and total cost of ownership

It is useful to consider the total cost of ownership of a corporate card platform. This includes direct charges such as monthly fees, account maintenance fees, foreign transaction fees, and FX mark-ups, as well as indirect costs such as the time staff spend on manual reconciliation, chasing receipts, and correcting errors. A transparent pricing model – for example, no account opening fee, no monthly fee, and clearly disclosed FX margins – makes it much easier to forecast the true cost of using the platform. 

3. Global issuance and currency capability

Whether the platform can support cross-border and multi-market operations is a key consideration. Airwallex offers credit limits in HKD or USD, enabling SMEs to transact in Hong Kong dollars or US dollars, proactively manage cash flow, and reduce unnecessary currency conversions and FX losses – keeping operations running smoothly.

Traditional corporate cards vs Airwallex

The table below summarises how traditional corporate credit cards from banks compare with an integrated platform such as Airwallex:

Traditional bank cards largely remain within the narrow domain of payment, whereas Airwallex acts as a broader financial backbone, connecting day-to-day spending with how the business manages its cash, costs, and growth.

FAQs

What is required to apply for an Airwallex corporate credit card?

You can apply online by providing basic business registration documents and company details, without needing to visit the office. 

What is the difference between virtual and physical Airwallex Corporate Cards?

Virtual Corporate Cards can be created instantly and are well suited to online subscriptions, advertising accounts and project-based expenditure. Both types are managed within the same platform and are subject to the same controls.

Will using an Airwallex Corporate Card affect personal credit scores?

No – credit assessment and liability sit with the business, so normal use of the card does not affect personal credit scores.

How does cashback on Airwallex Corporate Cards work?

Eligible business credit card spend can earn a cash rebate, which is credited to your Airwallex account and can be used towards future business expenses.

Can different limits and controls be set for different employees or teams?

Yes – admins can set per-card limits, apply merchant restrictions and adjust or cancel cards at any time to manage spend more precisely.