to stay about the same in the next few years, with the only exception of traveller convenience,” he says. “I think there will be increased focus and importance on making the traveller experience as comfortable as possible. This will be realised through mobile applications that help the traveller to find airport lounges, merchant discounts and to calculate currency conversions. But most importantly there will be increased focus on providing employees with solutions to manage receipts and file expense reports while they are on the road. Mobile will play a big role in this.” How mobile payments will affect
into their expense management reports. Amex reports a 30 per cent increase in customers requesting data files for this purpose in 2011. It saves travellers considerable time and helps generate a reliable data flow. “It’s about capturing as many transactions as possible in electronic form,” says Cannings. “The more transactions piped through, the more the benefit. An increasingly important metric for companies is the proportion of transactions they have flowing through the card, expense management system and enterprise resource planning application with full reconciliation to the audit process.” Not every customer has woken up
to what it can achieve, according to Brian Merry, director of product for HRG. He still finds companies which have a corporate card but no expense reporting system, or an expense reporting system but no card, or sometimes companies which have both but have not connected them to each other.
And another temptation, says
AirPlus’s Klein, is to think that expense process integration stops at joining the card and expense tool. “It is a little like a diet,” she says. “You have to exercise more and eat less over a long time. There isn’t one quick win. To get real
In association with
process efficiencies you have to look at the whole process. Linking the card to the expense management system is easy. The big saving is when you tackle the entire reconciliation process, such as automated uploading of invoices.” It is a task, Klein acknowledges, which is easier said than done and can often involve breaking down entrenched practices in some parts of the business. However, she adds, the UK has made more progress in this respect than almost anywhere else in Europe. So far, what has been discussed mainly concerns how cards fulfil the
“It’s about capturing as many transactions as possible in electronic form – the more transactions, the more the benefit”
strategic needs of travel managers and their allies in the finance department. Another very important internal stakeholder is of course the traveller, and Diners Club’s Tom Edgerton stands out from his competitors in predicting that this is where the biggest shift in card programme strategic objectives will take place. “I expect the priorities
both travellers and travel managers is discussed in more detail in another article (p20), but Amex is seeing signs today of clients attempting to improve the traveller experience with conventional plastic cards. Andrew Buckley reports that one of his company’s clients, a professional services firm, has downgraded its travel policy to economy but sought to sweeten this bitter pill by offering its travellers premium Amex cards that include complimentary airport lounge access. “It is not seen as a reward but as a hard-headed, rational way to help people on the road,” he says.
EMERGENCY SERVICES There are also early examples emerging of another, very different, way in which card companies can help corporate clients look after travellers: by using their transaction data to track employees in the event of an emergency. Although it does not provide a complete picture, card information can fill in extra details not evident from more conventional forms of tracking, such as through booking data. For example, reservation data
can indicate where an employee was intending to stay, but it cannot prove whether the traveller checked into the property (or indeed whether they checked out) on the date they originally booked. “We can help to locate travellers in
extreme cases,” says MasterCard’s Stynen. “Data usually shows up in our reporting tool 24 to 48 hours after payment is made, but it can be accessed real-time if necessary.” n