AirPlus International and Kresus Technologies Help European Businesses Regain Control of Their Indirect Purchasing, in Collaboration with Mastercard

WHY THIS MATTERS

The strategic partnership announced on May 28, 2026, between AirPlus International and European B2B fintech platform Kresus Technologies, in direct collaboration with Mastercard, attacks a notorious cash-flow leaky bucket in corporate procurement: tail spend. While enterprise resource planning (ERP) architectures are tightly engineered to manage high-volume, core strategic supplier contracts, “indirect spend”—the low-value, un-vetted, or ad-hoc corporate purchases like software SaaS renewals, emergency equipment repairs, and one-off vendor services—remains structurally unmanaged.

Representing roughly 20% to 30% of total corporate expenditure, tail spend usually travels outside established systemic guardrails. Employees frequently rely on manual expense reimbursements or shared physical corporate plastic, creating a massive regulatory blind spot for finance directors and rendering real-time budget forecasting impossible. By weaving AirPlus’s institutional virtual card generation framework together with Kresus’s intelligent payment orchestration middleware and Mastercard’s global cross-border acceptance rails, this alliance bridges the operational gap. It introduces absolute fiscal discipline into casual spending loops without choking corporate agility.

AirPlus International and Kresus Technologies, today announce a new partnership, in collaboration with Mastercard, to help European businesses better manage everyday indirect spending.  

By combining AirPlus virtual cards, Kresus Technologies payment platform, and Mastercard’s global acceptance network, businesses gain enhanced control and visibility over transactions through a single, streamlined payment and approval platform.  

The new solution addresses a persistent challenge for finance and procurement teams: managing indirect spend which refers to low-value, non-strategic purchases such as online subscriptions, one-off suppliers, licence renewals or urgent repairs, which often fall outside standard procurement processes but can account for 20–30% of total expenditure[1]. 

The solution brings together three key capabilities across the indirect spend lifecycle: 

• Acceptance: Businesses can pay any supplier – including those who do not accept card payments – without the need to onboard occasional vendors. 

• Approval: Each transaction follows configurable approval workflows aligned with internal policies, strengthening control without adding complexity for employees. 

• Integration: Payments are automatically reconciled within existing ERP and finance systems, ensuring seamless alignment between spending and accounting.  

This enables organisations to pay a broad range of suppliers, including those not traditionally enabled for card payments, while improving cash flow and reducing the risk of late supplier payments.   

It also strengthens control, visibility and consistency across tail spend for businesses across Europe, supporting compliant purchasing and payment processes.  

David Baker, Head of Global Bank & Distribution, B2B Partners and Solution Sales, AirPlus International: “For over thirty years, AirPlus has supported businesses in digitalising their corporate payments. By combining our virtual card expertise with Kresus’s technology platform and the Mastercard network, we offer procurement and finance departments an operational solution for non-strategic purchases, immediately deployable across Europe.”  

César Vial, CEO of Kresus Technologies: “Kresus brings the technical infrastructure that makes this kind of partnership possible — the orchestration layer that turns corporate card programmes into intelligent, scalable payment experiences. Combining that with AirPlus’s unmatched distribution reach among European corporates and Mastercard’s global network creates a uniquely powerful approach that the European market has never seen before.”  

Tulsi Narayan, Executive Vice President, Commercial & New Payment Flows, Europe, Mastercard: “Businesses throughout Europe are seeking smarter and more efficient approaches to managing tail spend and B2B payments. Through our collaboration with Kresus and AirPlus, we’re combining intelligent payment orchestration with Mastercard’s global acceptance network to deliver stronger control, improved security, better cash flow, and more streamlined processes — enabling businesses to scale with greater efficiency and confidence.” 

FF NEWS TAKE

The AirPlus-Kresus framework introduces a vital architectural asset class to corporate spending: non-vendor card adoption. Historically, corporate virtual card programs broke down the moment a business encountered a critical long-tail supplier—such as a specialized regional contractor or a localized logistics handler—that refused to accept standard credit card processing due to margin-eroding interchange fees. When an emergency vendor rejects plastic, corporate buyers are forced to revert to manual, weeks-long supplier onboarding cycles just to execute a single invoice payment.

Kresus Technologies, under CEO César Vial, resolves this bottleneck by serving as a stateful payment orchestration and conversion engine. The platform enables corporate treasury desks to issue an AirPlus virtual card programmatically within a native browser interface, input the vendor’s traditional banking credentials, and trigger an automated routing mechanism. Kresus absorbs the virtual card ledger balances, processes the cross-border transaction file through the global Mastercard infrastructure, and distributes localized, cash-equivalent clearing funds directly to the merchant’s target account.

Backed by AirPlus’s immense corporate distribution network (which services over 55,000 global corporate accounts following its landmark acquisition by banking giant SEB Kort), the system enforces strict pre-trade approval policies and automated multi-currency reconciliation loops directly within enterprise ledgers. This transforms indirect tail spend from a messy administrative headache into an elegant, audit-ready data stream.