American Express announced on October 1, 2024 that qualified US merchants accepting its cards could access Boost Payment Solutions’ Boost Intercept to automate commercial virtual-card processing. The partners said the service would be offered at no additional cost to those qualified merchants. [S01]

Removing manual steps from supplier payments

The announcement addressed a familiar accounts-receivable workflow: an employee receives a virtual-card payment by email and manually enters the card details into a payment terminal. Boost Intercept was intended to automate receipt, interpretation and processing of those payments, with transaction data supporting reconciliation. [S01]

The stated absence of an additional charge applied to the offered Boost Intercept service. It should not be interpreted as a claim that all underlying card acceptance or merchant-service fees were eliminated. [S01]

Commercial cards are a different use case from gift cards

Although American Express also offered gift and prepaid products, this announcement concerned payments from business buyers to suppliers. Its relevance to the wider card sector is operational: automated acceptance can reduce the work required after a digital payment instruction arrives. [S01]

The partners described potential improvements in payment speed and accounting efficiency. They did not disclose measured results for merchants using this newly announced arrangement. Those benefits should therefore be read as the proposition’s aims rather than a demonstrated outcome for every supplier.

A useful assessment would follow the full workflow from receipt of the payment instruction through settlement and matching to an invoice. Automating only the first step does not establish how much administrative time a business ultimately saves.