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Availability

This guide is intended to provide a general outline of new Galileo functionality prior to its release to production. The information in this guide is therefore subject to change as development proceeds and is not a guarantee of future functionality. If you are interested in this feature, contact Galileo for details.

## Why this new feature?

Galileo already offers <a href="doc:about-real-time-funding" target="_blank">Real-Time Funding</a> for debit accounts, which associates multiple debit cards with a single funding account. However, many small businesses prefer a credit-based system to help manage expenses, because it helps the business build a better credit score and is easier to obtain than a small-business loan.

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With Galileo's Corporate Credit offering, you can provide your business customers with a central credit limit that multiple charge cards draw from. This arrangement simplifies expense management, because a company's employees can spend only as much as the credit limit permits. A single billing cycle makes statements easy, and terms and repayments happen at a corporate level.

## What this means to your customers

The employees of some smaller businesses use their personal credit-card accounts for business expenses and then claim the expenses in a separate process. To replace and simplify that process, you can offer corporate charge cards so that all business-related expenditures are reported together, thereby eliminating the need for separate expense claims.

Furthermore, small-to-medium businesses may find it easier to qualify for a corporate credit program than for a small business loan. You can offer them one or more funding accounts to help improve their credit score and to help them expand their business.

You can combine a Corporate Credit offering with <a href="doc:about-account-level-auth-controls" target="_blank">Account-Level Authorization Controls</a>, which impose different spending restrictions per account. These controls can affect the amount per transaction, the number of transactions per timespan, the total amount per timespan, the merchant category, and specific merchant locations.

### Authorization experience

Employees with charge cards are able to make purchases in the conventional manner, with no change to the authorization process. Only when the credit limit on the corresponding funding account is exhausted will their purchases be declined.

## What this means to you

Because a Corporate Credit program uses credit <<glossary:BIN>>s instead of debit BINs, you can garner higher interchange rates per purchase (with Mastercard Account-Level Management). Fraud protection also tends to be better for credit than for debit, and businesses don't need to provide a large amount of cash up front, as with a debit account.

By leveraging Galileo's <a href="doc:about-corporate-hierarchy" target="_blank">Corporate Hierarchy</a> you can easily organize your customers' funding accounts with their respective charge cards. This organization makes it easy for you to create expense reports per funding account, which you can expose on a customer dashboard. Your customers can then drill down to activity on each individual card.

For your customers that maintain vehicle pools, you can offer corporate <a href="doc:fleet-cards" target="_blank">Fleet Cards</a> with the specialized reporting that program provides.

## What you provide

You will be managing the following features with your internal logic:

  • Fees

  • Interest

  • Statements

  • Grace period

  • Repayments

  • Delinquency

## What Galileo provides

From Galileo you can expect:

  • API endpoints to set and update the credit limit, retrieve the current balance and remaining credit, and associate charge cards with funding accounts

  • <<glossary:RDF>>s containing a list of all transactions so that you can itemize purchases per charge card

  • Real-time event messages for authorizations, reversals, and settlements

## General properties

  • Corporate Credit is a credit offering that links charge cards to a single funding account. The funding account has a credit limit that is shared by all of the linked charge cards.

  • The funding account balance must be paid in full at the end of the billing cycle.

  • Partial payments can be made to the funding account, which replenishes the credit limit.

  • The one-month billing cycle applies at a corporate level. As desired, you can build your own logic to create a billing cycle with a different period, such as two weeks.

  • The credit limit can be changed at any time.

  • Reversed transactions, merchant credits and card loads are automatically returned to the funding account.

  • Disputed transactions are not included in the credit limit.

  • Works well with these Galileo products:

    • <a href="doc:about-corporate-hierarchy" target="_blank">Corporate Hierarchy</a> — Organize funding and charge accounts and improve reporting.

    • <a href="doc:about-account-level-auth-controls" target="_blank">Account-Level Authorization Controls</a> — Impose granular spend controls on individual accounts.

    • <a href="doc:fleet-cards" target="_blank">Fleet Cards</a> — Provide detailed transaction data for vehicles and equipment.

## Use cases

These use cases present some ways you and your customers can take advantage of Corporate Credit as well as Galileo's other business offerings.

### Use case 1: Northern Floral

Northern Floral has ten employees, four of whom are authorized to make purchases. Each of the four employees has a company charge card that is linked to the same funding account, which has a credit limit of $10,000. As each employee spends against the credit limit, Northern Floral receives notification of the purchases along with the remaining available credit amount.

Several times per week, Northern Floral makes partial repayments, which replenishes the credit limit. For example, if halfway through the billing cycle the combined total spending of the four cards is $7000, and Northern floral repays $400, the remaining credit limit increases from $3000 to $3400.

At the end of the billing cycle, Northern Floral pays the entire balance, and the credit limit resets to $10,000. Their spending and repayment activity is reported to the credit bureaus, which helps increase their business credit rating.

### Use case 2: Southern Manufacturing

Southern Manufacturing makes products to support the farming industry. Production is divided into three main divisions: irrigation systems, storage, and heavy equipment such as tractors, harvesters and cultivators.

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With the accounts organized by group, you can create reports for each division and present them in a customer dashboard. The dashboard could show the remaining credit limit per division and permit the customer to drill down to expenditures per card. The company could also use your dashboard to make payments into each funding account.

If you enable Account-Level Authorization Controls for Southern Manufacturing, you can set different spending limits for each account, according to the cardholders' levels of responsibility. For example, the managers in each group could be authorized to spend more per week than the regular cardholders, or the cardholders in one division could be authorized to make purchases at merchant types that cardholders in other divisions cannot make.