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An Interview with Richard Crum, Group Head for Travel & Entertainment Global Commercial Products & Solutions
THE NEXT GENERATIONS IN TRAVEL PAYMENTS
T Richard Crum
What is the genesis behind this new product? Travel & Entertainment (T&E) is a critical spend category for nearly all corporations. It is also, typically, the second largest controllable expense after salaries and benefits. To date, corporate card issuers have offered the central travel account solution enabling large market corporations to charge hundreds of travel-related transactions to a single account lodged with a chose for decades. Central travel accounts let the company charge travel related expenses to a single account. The challenge with these comes with reconciliation and internal accounting of all the air, car and hotel transactions because everything is charged to that one single lodged card. That causes headaches for the travel manager. MasterCard Travel Controller provides a better solution that makes the process much simpler for the travel manager.
How does Travel Controller help? With minimal upfront investment and systems integration, Travel Controller gives companies the opportunity to remedy this pain point by helping the travel manager more easily allocate charges to the appropriate cost center budgets. It ensures that key data needed for account reconciliation is available 100% of the time and that it integrates with the automated expense reporting tool for full visibility of travel costs to the approving cost center management.
his October MasterCard introduced MasterCard® Travel
Controller™, a new solution for the corporate travel industry which offers travel management companies and their corporate clients the ability to reconcile expenses more quickly and helping to control spending, reduce operational costs and ensure
compliance with corporate travel policy – key challenges all travel managers face today. According to Richard Crum, Group Head for Travel & Entertainment, Global Commercial Products & Solutions, MasterCard, “companies of every size leave travel budget on the table through unmanaged activity. Companies should look for ways to prevent ‘leakage’ and
How does Travel Controller work? Travel Controller provides easy access to Virtual Account Numbers (VANs) for central travel-related
expenses. The central travel account serves as the master form of payment upon which Travel Controller functions and from which each VAN is issued. All VANs are charged back to the central travel account. Travel expense reconciliation is simplified by ensuring that companies get the specific data they need to integrate automatically into the expense management and ERP systems. Because booking data is linked to a unique card number or VAN, Travel Controller can ensure that the detailed information is available for the original transaction. The Travel Controller transaction seamlessly integrates into the company’s expense management system to ensure managers have the proper visibility over the total cost of any business trip.
You’ve now been at MasterCard for almost two years, what have been your biggest surprises?
The biggest surprise was how many solutions MasterCard offers corporations to help them manage
business travel – an entire suite of business products that surpasses the competition. Everything starts with greater acceptance which translates into better data and enhanced reporting. When companies are asked to rank the importance of product attributes in their selection of a card issuer for their T&E program, areas of strength for
look to increase cost savings by better managing their travel program. Controlling spend to achieve contracted terms and policy compliance is fundamental to effective travel management.” We sat down with Richard to ask a few questions about MasterCard Travel Controller and why it’s so timely and important to the marketplace now.
MasterCard such as acceptance, data and reporting always rise to the top.
94% of business traveler rate acceptance as the “most or very important” feature of a Corporate card.
53% of international businesses have been caught in a scenario where their card was not accepted.
59% of travel managers say non-acceptance undermines business objectives.
52% state that non-acceptance erodes credibility of travel program leading to non-compliance.
33% say non-acceptance leads to material reduction of rebate with preferred suppliers.
Over 37 million acceptance locations – more than 2.5 times more that of American Express – companies gain many real financial benefits as a result of the MasterCard acceptance network The bottom line is that card acceptance matters to corporations and MasterCard provides companies with the global network that their business travelers need, and that acceptance drives real financial value to the companies that run their travel payments with a corporate card run on our network!
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