CORPORATE CARDS
Have a care
The voluminous data collected through corporate card transactions delivers in forensic detail exactly what a traveller is doing, when and where. “Enhanced data attached to each transaction continues to be expanded. For instance, PNR numbers and VAT breakdowns are increasingly required,” says Diners Club’s Adrian Steele. For duty of care, data is paramount. “Clients are asking us for more than standard insight,” says Steve Robson. “Through richer data we hope to be able to give them advice on pinning together their cardholder behaviour.” Card data demonstrates how far in advance a traveller books and how much extra they spent by not doing so; over 40,000 travellers, this mounts up. In addition, it can show not only what an employee planned to do but what he actually did – booked a hotel but didn’t check in. And it can track in real time that he landed at the destination airport, bought coffee and used his card on the metro system. “The challenge is how we present that and whom we might partner with in the industry to provide that data because that is not our specialism.” Amex is also seeing growing demand for spend analysis tools. “Data alone is not enough and we have launched Compliance Insights, which helps clients identify how they can best prevent out of policy spend and ensures greater cost control,” says Fabienne Cauli. Also new is American Express Ready Response, which gives real-time spend data. It alerts travel managers to an incident and showing recent transactions of employees in or near the affected location, helping to pinpoint their whereabouts. Digitisation will move on card services apace and with virtual cards and mobile, the industry is responding to what is happening in the consumer world, hopefully to create a perfect storm.
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Through richer data we hope to be able to give clients advice on pinning together their cardholder behaviour”
[ CASE STUDY ] Meetings and events are important to grow business, develop strategy, further R&D and promote stakeholder engagement for a global science-based company active in health, nutrition and materials that improve performance. It implemented Cvent to manage meeting and events, including assigning budgets, creating an event-specific website/mobile app, managing delegate invitations, venue selection and more. Simultaneously, the business introduced purchasing cards to enable a limited number of people to manage last-minute expenses. But there were still challenges such as suppliers that needed immediate payment, cross-border payments, sustainability and visibility, so the organisation sought to develop a process based on four objectives: agility of booking, real-time payment capability, controls and security, and effective budget tracking. Citi and Cvent together determined that credit cards would be ideally suited as a payment method but traditional plastic was impractical as it would require cards with extremely high limits and sharing the card details with a number of suppliers. So they integrated Cvent’s meetings management platform with Citi’s Virtual Card Account platform, bringing real-time payment capability. “The combined tools not only meet the client’s objectives but bring the meetings management lifecycle on to a single platform, improving visibility and control,” says Steve Robson.
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7/30/18 02:00 PM