With the virtual credit cards, you also need a billing address in most cases. I guess that can be the same for all customers. Perhaps they also get an email address with it and that handles all the receipts/invoices. Alternatively they can all be sent to some service/app where they can be sorted/managed.
I would like to use something like this if I'm not keen to share my card details with a company e.g. because I know they've had a data breach in the past or something. How much would I be willing to pay for it? Probably not much to be honest, maybe a few quid?
Must admit, I like the acquiring idea more.
On the merchant acquiring stuff I can see the attraction for merchants but what's the incentive for customers? I guess there has to be some other benefit... e.g. offering credit on decent terms to customers but here you are competing with credit cards? Or maybe offer discounts for paying using this service. Maybe you can offer a discount AND credit. I guess you'd need to find out how price sensitive the merchants and customers are. Experience suggests that small merchants are price sensitive to acquiring fees as they have minimum spend limits etc. Large retailers e.g. Tesco don't care so much.... though I was buying a car at the weekend and the dealer stopped accepting AMEX due to the acquiring fees... I guess they were cutting costs in the face of Corona Virus recession.
As you note, perhaps the app could collate all your receipts and warranties - could be useful. Itemised receipts would be particularly useful for some.
I imagine a company which offers this service (in the EU/UK) would be an open banking payment services provider. That is, customers add their bank account details and permit the service to "push" payments directly to retailers when they buy something via an API. Of course, customers would manually approve each payment via the app or whathaveyou.
Challenges: 1) how do you handle off-line payments? 2) how do you handle disputes?
On the history of merchant acquiring: maybe this helps: https://blog.thesharmas.org/2020/06/05/history-merchant-acqu...