When WEX launched its virtual card solution for Thai travel agents at a Mastercard-hosted seminar in Bangkok recently, the announcement looked routine. Thai Airways served as the anchor airline supplier. Worldpay handled acquiring. Mastercard provided the network infrastructure through its Wholesale Programme. For Thai agencies, it was the arrival of a fully structured, end-to-end payment product built specifically around their market.
For Africa, it was a useful mirror.
The virtual card is not a novel technology. It is a single-use digital payment instrument with a unique card number, expiration date, and transaction-level controls. For travel agencies, it solves a persistent problem: how to pay airlines, hotels, and other suppliers efficiently, transparently, and without accumulating foreign exchange costs or reconciliation backlogs. Each card is tied to a specific transaction, eliminating the manual matching process that consumes significant back-office time. The controls built into each card reduce fraud exposure. The data attached to each payment improves reporting for both agents and suppliers.
The global market has moved decisively in this direction. WEX processes more than $90 billion in annual travel virtual card volume and works with eight of the top ten online travel agencies worldwide. In January 2026, it partnered with Nuvei to extend virtual card capabilities across Nuvei’s global merchant network. In June 2025, it integrated with Sabre Direct Pay to bring virtual cards into the GDS ecosystem. Worldpay launched its own virtual card programme with Mastercard in late 2024, specifically targeting supplier payouts for travel agents in the UK and Europe. Citi issues virtual cards in more than 50 markets globally, including South Africa. The infrastructure is mature, proven, and expanding.
African agencies are not entirely absent from this picture. Larger TMCs operating in South Africa and Kenya, and corporate travel programmes run by global players, are already using virtual cards to manage some supplier payments. The technology exists in the market. The problem is that it is not working the way it should.
A September 2025 report from South African travel trade publication Travelnews documented the gap clearly. TMCs and corporate travel buyers continue to struggle with cross-border transactions across Africa due to limited financial infrastructure and inconsistent supplier adoption of new payment solutions. Virtual cards help address some of these challenges, but a lack of consistent supplier acceptance has prevented the full benefits from being realised. Suppliers are charged an additional VCC surcharge on top of international transaction fees for every virtual card transaction, and in markets where margins are already thin, that cost calculus discourages acceptance. The result is a circular problem: agencies cannot derive full value from virtual card products because suppliers reject them or surcharge them into irrelevance, and suppliers will not invest in acceptance infrastructure because agency demand remains too fragmented to justify the cost.
West Africa faces ongoing card acceptance limitations, while many establishments across the continent remain reluctant to accept certain card types due to perceived higher merchant fees. SARB compliance challenges with invoice documentation compound payment processing in South Africa, while markets like Zimbabwe and Mozambique carry their own historical payment difficulties. These are not fringe markets. They are core corridors for regional business travel.
The BSP sits underneath all of this. For most African travel agencies, the Billing and Settlement Plan is not just a settlement mechanism. It is the financial backbone of the business model, the mechanism through which agencies collect from clients, remit to airlines, and manage cash flow across weekly and bi-weekly cycles. For a well-capitalised European TMC with treasury operations and multi-currency card processing, the transition away from BSP-dependent settlement is a project. For an African agency operating on thin credit lines, dependent on BSP settlement cycles to manage cash flow, and without access to the payment infrastructure that NDC direct billing assumes, it is an existential question.
The NDC dimension sharpens the problem further. Virtual cards are increasingly the natural payment instrument for NDC-based transactions, where the airline becomes the merchant and BSP settlement no longer applies in the traditional sense. As airlines push more content through direct and aggregator channels, agencies that cannot process virtual card payments efficiently are structurally disadvantaged in accessing that content. The agencies most exposed to this risk are not the large South African TMCs with established card programmes. They are the mid-tier and independent agencies in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Kigali that form the backbone of retail air ticket distribution across the continent.
The Thailand model illustrates what a structured activation looks like. Thai Airways agreed to accept virtual card payments from local agencies. WEX issued the cards. Mastercard provided the network framework. Worldpay handled acquiring. Every participant had a commercial reason to engage, and the seminar hosted by Mastercard provided the convening moment that brought it together. The result is a four-way structure where issuance, network, acquiring, and supplier acceptance are all aligned.
That alignment does not yet exist in any African market for travel agency virtual card payments at scale. But the components are closer than the industry conversation suggests. Mastercard boosted its Africa acceptance network by 45 percent in 2025 and opened new offices in Ghana, Uganda, and Mauritius, with further markets planned for 2026. WEX has a licensed virtual card presence in the UAE and has positioned its EMEA strategy as covering Africa. The continent has carriers capable of anchoring the kind of supplier agreement that made the Thailand launch possible. RwandAir, Kenya Airways, Ethiopian Airlines, and Air Peace all have the agency distribution networks and commercial relationships to play that role.
What is missing is not infrastructure. It is the coordinated activation. Someone needs to convene the seminar, align the four parties, and commit to local go-to-market execution in a specific African market.
Africa recorded the fastest global tourism growth in the first half of 2025, with inbound business travel growing at an average annual rate of around 28 percent between 2021 and 2025. That growth is generating real transaction volume across the continent’s travel agency ecosystem. The agencies handling that volume are closer to a fully functioning virtual card ecosystem than most industry conversations acknowledge.
The Bangkok moment is replicable. The question is who moves first.
