IBS Journal Supplement 2015


New travel payments product launched in EMEA


Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) has brought to market a new payments offering for corporate clients, BAML Travel Pro, aimed at managing business travel expenditure. The product has been on the mar-


ket for around three months and ‘is still in its infancy’, says Mel Gargagliano, head of commercial cards for GTS EMEA at the bank, adding that the bank sees a lot of potential as the project itself ‘has been driven by the voice of our clients’. A key feature is the additional data


that can be captured in great detail, ena- bling the user to centralise and control their spending. This includes car hire, hotel


booking, as well as purchasing railroad tickets and low-cost airline tickets. There are 29 fields of data that can be put in, such as an employee’s ID, checking in and out dates and so on, says Gargagliano. The bank is keen to emphasise that


it is the first commercial card issuer in the EMEA region to launch such a prod- uct. The project was six months in the making, from the conception of the idea to putting it through tests and unveil- ing it to the market, says Caroline John- son-Jones, BAML’s commercial cards prod- uct manager, GTS EMEA. ‘The key was capturing the data, making it flow and helping with reconciliation.’ The project


required a lot of testing that was carried out largely in-house, says Johnson-Jones, by the bank’s implementation and plat- form teams, plus a team from Mastercard, BAML’s card solutions partner. There was no additional technology


required, as the work was done via the existing set-up with Mastercard, says Johnson-Jones. A unique 16-digit virtual card account number is used for each transaction, integrated with a travel man- agement company, with the data flowing in secure XML messaging format. The offering is currently available


across 27 countries in EMEA, with plans to roll it out globally.


‘The key was capturing the data, making it flow and helping with reconciliation.’


Caroline Johnson-Jones, Bank of America Merrill Lynch


Bank of America in London ©Herve Boinay, Flickr


10 © IBS Intelligence 2015 www.ibsintelligence.com


round-up: who’s doing what


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