THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE I 39
➔ Swipe and go is the future of dough THE REVIEW ›› TECHNOLOGY
I NEVER thought I'd say this, but sometimes I just can't help feeling that cash is a bit of a nuisance, writes Mike Swindell. It's bulky, it ruins the line of
your designer jackets or falls out of a hole in your pocket, it's often grubby, you never know where it's been and it's all too easy to steal. On the other side of the coin, so to speak, bus- inesses aren't too enamoured with the stuff either. Again, it's bulky, it's too easy to
steal and with the need to create all sorts of accounting and administrative processes to deal with it, it costs money to get rid of it to the banks. All in all, those coins are a pain in the wallet. And because it's such a nuisance we're finding ways of doing without it. In the UK's case, as with most other economies around the world, the result is an increasing use
of credit and debit cards. But in Japan – a country that
has not developed the credit card habit to the same extent – the answer, at least for day-to- day travel, is stored value, or if you like, the Oyster card. This has caught the attention
of business expense management company Spendvision, which is seeing its new eMoney module gaining ground in the Japanese business community. "In Japan, eWallets and digital
cash have been around for years and take up is high as a result of the integration with the travel network," says Spendvision COO Shane Bruhns. "The convenience of simply tapping a device against a reader to make a payment is ideal, which is why a third of the population uses emoney and transactions account for more than 1.25 trillion yen. "Payments made with digital
cash are commonly expensed by employees and we believe this will soon be the case in other areas of the world," adds Bruhns. While the technology in Japan
is now quite sophisticated, with mobile phones enabled to act as 'near field communication' (NFC) devices – a posh form of the familiar Oystercard eWallet – the problem for companies is that
until now, there has been no way of accurately reconciling the expenditure on the tap-and- go device with actual business trips made. Until Spendvision stepped in,
your typical middle-of-the road Japanese employee, out and about on sales or other travel- heavy business, would top up the stored value device and submit the top-up bill to line management along with an expenses record that he or she had to sit down and construct, hoping, of course, that the two would match. This requires a considerable
degree of trust on the part of the employer and a lot of creative accounting on the part of the employee. At a stroke, Spendvision's new eMoney module has done away with all that pencil and paper stuff by developing a system that reads the transaction data held in the NFC device – now a mobile phone – and delivers that data to the desktop where it is moved to a server and uploaded to Spendvision. The traveller can now select
items as either personal or business and send the business information off to an expenses report that is delivered through line management to finance where the system develops a BACS-style file for automatic payment. There's not a yen note in sight and the company gets
“The convenience of simply tapping a device against a reader to make a payment is ideal, which is why a third of the Japanese population uses e-money and annual transactions account for more than 1.25 trillion yen”
lots of useful management information to boot. The eMoney module is available
as an opt-in upgrade to the Spendvision platform worldwide and can deal with transactions in any country using any currency. But Bruhns is refreshingly honest on the immediate prospects of a breakthrough in 'wave and pay' style transactions into mainstream life in countries solidly wedded to the credit and debit card system. "Evolution is hindered by the
complexity of payment networks and it would be arrogant and foolhardy to think that we can influence the industry to move to something like near field communications. We are simply not big enough. "But I believe we are moving to simpler ways of making payment and removing cash from the system," he said. "We are here and we are ready for change." Payments specialist AirPlus is
also dabbling in NFC technology, having already tested an iPhone prototype system, with a pilot phase under market conditions is the next step. But as AirPlus chairman of the executive board, Patrick Diemer, points out, change is still some way off. “It’ll be a long time before we phase out plastic. There are 30million merchant terminals around the world so it would require a major infrastructure change,” he says.
60 THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE
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