Virtual credit cards are now back — but instead of mostly being issued by consumer-facing banks like Citi or Amex, the biggest issuers are B2B companies like Stripe and Marqeta. The idea is to generate card numbers to be given out to employees for corporate expenses while giving the employer fine-grained control over spending limits, which vendors are permissioned, and the like.
One of the more popular use cases for virtual credit cards was subscriptions. By buying a subscription with a credit card number that was set to expire in a couple of months, consumers could avoid automatic future charges.