Business Banking Enhancements

Galileo offers specialized products for business banking that address use cases that are particular to corporate and small-business needs. You can implement as many of these products as you like—their functions complement and enhance each other, which helps your business customers optimize their card programs.

Spending controls

To help you set and manage limits on corporate spending as well as keep track of where funds are spent, Galileo offers account-level controls and real-time funding.

Account-level controls

When you set up a card product, you and your bank establish spending limits such as per-transaction amounts, daily totals and merchant types.

To exert granular control over each card, you can implement account-level controls, which impose custom limits on a per-account basis. See Account-Level Authorization Controls for more information.

Real-time funding

When companies issue spending cards to their employees, it can be complicated to keep track of all of the balances as well as control the spending.

Galileo offers solutions whereby a company sets up one or more central funds, and the employee spending cards all draw from that central fund. Keeping track of how much has been spent is as easy as checking the balance on the central account. Data on individual card activity is also available for reconciliation.

• Real-Time Funding — Using debit BINs, this product creates a central funding account, and the spending cards draw down the amount in the funding account.
• Corporate Credit — Using credit BINs, this product creates a central funding account that has a single credit limit that the spending cards draw from.

Corporate hierarchy

To help organize your business accounts in groups that can be hierarchically arranged, Galileo offers specialized endpoints that assign group IDs to each account, making it easier for you to retrieve information on one group or a series of groups. This arrangement can contribute to your customer dashboards, which can show how accounts are organized, or it can help you separate accounts by client. See Corporate Hierarchy for more information.

Mastercard Smart Data

Businesses that provide their employees with Mastercard payment cards can sign up for Mastercard Smart Data, a Mastercard expense-management solution that provides organizations with detailed information about purchases. For example, when an employee uses a company card to pay for a hotel room, Mastercard provides data about the type of room, room rates, and incidental purchases. This data comes straight from the hotel industry, so it will always be the latest information.

Galileo supports Mastercard Smart Data by relaying transaction information for supported accounts to Mastercard, who then adds enhanced data and delivers the file directly to your expense-management system or a specified endpoint for detailed analysis and reporting.

After you sign up for Smart Data with Mastercard, coordinate with Galileo to enable it on the Galileo system. You will need to do these things:

• Decide which industries you would like enhanced data for, such as airline travel, hotel data, or Amazon business data.
• Set up a Corporate hierarchy so that the root group supports Smart Data, and include selected accounts in the groups. See Example hierarchy in Creating a Corporate Hierarchy for instructions on enabling Smart Data for a root group.
• Set up an endpoint where Mastercard will deliver the files. The endpoint should be set up so that your expense-management system can easily consume the files.

Higher interchange rates

Some small-business spending cards rack up totals well into five digits or more per year. To reward such high-volume cards, Mastercard offers a program wherein the card issuer can get higher interchange rates according to cardholder spend. Mastercard's Account-Level Management (ALM) specifies five tiers that assign higher interchange rates, depending on average spending. For example, the first tier would be for small business accounts that average less than $20K per quarter, and the next tier for averages from $20K–$40K, and so on.

Mastercard determines which tier a small-business card belongs to, according to the previous three months' spending (rolling average). As the averages increase or decrease, Mastercard seamlessly moves the small-business accounts into the appropriate tiers, without requiring that new cards be issued, as long as small-business spend is enabled.

Part of the interchange that you earn must be returned to the cardholder in the form of rewards. For example, you might return 150 basis points to cardholders.

Galileo supports the authorization and reporting needs for this program. One reporting need is the universal file, which helps with shortfall calculations. Mastercard calculates the spending for each small-business PAN at the end of a quarter. In some cases the account holder may have spent the required amount, but it was across two PANs, because one of the cards was lost or stolen. To make sure Mastercard is doing the calculations correctly, the universal file provides information about linked PANs. This linkage helps reduce the fine that you may have to pay because account holders did not meet the required spend limit.

Likewise, cards that belong to the same business unit will be totalled in aggregate, and then the interchange rate will be applied to the individual cards.

You can see an individual transaction's interchange rate in the Base RDFs, in the INTERCHANGE RATE DESIGNATOR field, which contains PDS0158.

To sign up for this feature, contact Mastercard, and then let Galileo know you have signed up for it. Implementation charges are involved.

Consumer cards

Higher interchange rates are also available for consumer cards. However, automatically moving the cards between tiers is not supported, and the calculation interval is yearly instead of quarterly. Contact Galileo for details.

B2B Buy Now, Pay Later

With Galileo’s bank-issued Buy Now, Pay Later solution, you can offer your business customers a powerful tool to help better manage cash flow and day-to-day operations. While companies of all sizes can benefit from BNPL, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are particularly well served by BNPL loans to help overcome financial obstacles. See About Galileo Buy Now, Pay Later for more information.