The comparison people usually reach for is credit card against debit card, which gets the categories wrong before it starts. There are three kinds of business card in ordinary use, and only one of them involves borrowing.
A credit card spends the issuer's money. You get the goods now, the issuer pays the merchant now, and you settle at the end of a billing cycle. A debit card spends your money out of an account you hold. A prepaid card also spends your money, out of a balance loaded in advance. Debit and prepaid differ mostly in what sits behind them, and for a business choosing how to let its team spend, they behave almost identically. The real fork is credit or not.
What the float actually costs
The genuine advantage of a credit card is timing. Depending on where in the billing cycle a purchase lands, you hold onto your cash for somewhere between about 30 and 56 days before paying for it. For a business that pays suppliers before its customers pay it, that gap is worth real money, and no prepaid product replicates it.
What it costs is easy to under-count. There is interest if the balance is not cleared in full, and business card rates are rarely the headline rate. There is often an annual fee per card, which multiplies quietly as you add people. There are foreign-transaction fees on spend abroad, typically around 3%, which matters more than it sounds if your team buys software priced in dollars. And there is a credit application, which takes time, wants filed accounts, and can be declined.
The cost that gets read last is the personal guarantee. Most business credit cards for small and mid-sized companies ask a director to guarantee the balance personally. If the company cannot pay, the guarantor does, out of their own money. That is a substantial thing to sign for the convenience of a 45-day float, and it is worth deciding deliberately rather than discovering later.
What prepaid gives up, and what it buys
Prepaid gives up the float entirely. Money leaves your balance when the card is used. If the timing gap between paying out and being paid is your actual problem, this will not help and you should be looking at the terms you trade on, or at pay by invoice and treasury and payouts, rather than at cards.
What it buys is control and speed. There is no application to be declined, so a company incorporated last month can issue cards as soon as its account is open. There is no interest, no annual fee per card in most programmes, and nothing on the balance sheet. Your maximum exposure at any moment is the balance in the account rather than a facility somebody could draw down.
And because there is no underwriting per card, issuing a fifteenth card costs nothing and takes minutes. That is what makes per-person and per-vendor issuing practical: one virtual card per software subscription, one physical card per person who travels, each with its own limit and merchant categories. On a credit programme, each additional card is usually another fee and often another conversation.
The honest test
Ask which problem you are actually solving.
If it is cash-flow timing, where you pay in 30 and get paid in 60, you want credit, and the question becomes which terms and whether the guarantee is acceptable. Nothing on the prepaid side addresses this.
If it is control and reconciliation, meaning a shared card, an unexplained subscription and three days of month end spent matching receipts, you want prepaid cards issued per person or per purpose. A credit card with more users does not fix it, because the problem was never the funding source.
If it is building a company credit file, you want a product that reports to credit reference agencies, which prepaid does not. That is a real reason to hold a credit card and it sits alongside, not instead of, how you handle team spend.
Most finance teams past a certain size land on both, and split them by job rather than by seniority: a credit card at company level for the float and the cases where one is required, prepaid cards for everyone who needs to spend. That is not a compromise. They are answering different questions.
Where we sit
We do not offer credit, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than leaving it to be discovered. The cards in this group spend from balances held in your business account: physical and virtual, with per-card limits and instant freeze, issued by licensed card-programme institutions named before you commit. Company level spending from the account itself is covered on business debit cards; issuing to a team, with the controls and reporting that go with it, is on expense cards.
If a float is what you need, a card from us is not the answer, and we would rather tell you that than sell you the nearest thing we happen to have.