Card fraud on Australian-issued cards hit $854 million in FY25, with card-not-present transactions still accounting for the overwhelming majority.
But for SMEs, the bigger risk often isn’t external fraud. It’s the shared company card sitting in a drawer, with three signatures on the back and no one truly accountable for what gets charged to it.
If you can’t tell me, in under a minute, who used your shared card on Tuesday at 4pm, you don’t have a card. You have a liability.
Why shared cards fail
Shared cards collapse the three things that prevent fraud: ownership, visibility, and limits. When five people use one card:
- Charges can’t be tied to a person, only a department
- Reviews happen weeks later, when memory has faded
- Unauthorised charges hide inside legitimate ones
- Accountability disappears (“it’s the company card”)
- Small leaks creep in: duplicate subscriptions, out-of-policy spend, “just this once” purchases
Internal misuse is only half the risk. The other half is external: one compromised shared card exposes every transaction across every user. Reissuing it disrupts everyone at once.
The framework: dedicated cards, defined budgets, clear owners
The fix isn’t more approval forms. It’s structure that makes fraud and overspend visible before the money leaves the account.
1. One card, one person. Every cardholder gets a dedicated card tied to their name. No exceptions for “the team card.”
2. Budgets per card, not per cost centre. Set monthly or per-transaction limits at the card level. The system declines spend it shouldn’t allow. You don’t rely on someone catching it later.
3. Category and merchant controls. Restrict cards to the categories that person actually needs: travel, software, supplies. Block everything else by default.
4. Real-time visibility. Every transaction notifies the cardholder and their manager immediately. Anomalies surface in hours, not at month-end.
5. Instant freeze, instant reissue. When someone leaves or a card is lost, kill that one card. Not a shared instrument the whole team depends on. Virtual cards make this even faster: issue a replacement in 30 seconds, no waiting for plastic.
The principle
This isn’t about slowing the business down. It’s about giving every dollar an owner before it’s spent.
Fraud, internal or external, needs anonymity to thrive. Dedicated cards remove it. When every charge has a name attached, the shared-card liability disappears and finance gets the audit trail they’ve always needed.
The question isn’t whether your shared card has been misused. It’s whether you’d know if it had.
