Virtual payments • By Catherine Chetwynd


payment to low-cost carriers can be integrated into the cycle because it gener- ally does not go through the standard GDS [global distribution system] process; where it would otherwise have been put on to an invoice, it can now be put on a virtual card.” The demise of the lodge card has long


been predicted – but virtual cards are not a threat to their existence, mainly because the need to generate a card number for each transaction and to acquire the processing and back-end systems to support the new volumes of card numbers would add cost and complexity to a process that is handled by one piece of plastic with one number. And Concur is seeing faster growth in the use of lodge cards than of virtual cards. Use of Airplus’s Company Account is showing no signs of waning “because of the unrivalled data quality provided via the UATP [Universal Air Travel Plan] network – the quality of flown data cannot


Virtual cards account for around one-fifth of the monetary value of cash transactions, so it is a growing sector


be matched”, says Caroline Haywood, Airplus UK’s managing director. And Citi has invested in its lodge product and has seen “huge volumes” of business move to it.


JOINT PAYMENT SYSTEMS The launch in June last year of a joint virtual payment system from HRS and American Express highlighted another potential use of virtual cards. This ar- rangement removes the need for custom- ers to pay on leaving a hotel and allows


companies to generate a virtual card from their V Payment account to pay for accommodation centrally. Barclaycard sees a lot of use of virtual


cards by online travel agencies (OTAs) to pay for airline and hotel bookings. “In the past, if a travel agency wanted to pay for a hotel booking, they would have to give all the details of a card away; but a virtual card is a unique card number for a unique hotel stay, and the card doesn’t work outside the area it has been set up for,” says Barclaycard commercial cards product director Maria Parpou. “And as companies have an ever more transient workforce with temporary workers, this plays to the strength of virtual cards.“ She adds: “Organisations don’t want to sign up temporary people on plastic. We can see a higher degree of travel expense being booked centrally using virtual cards for this type of employee.”


MEETING EXPECTATIONS


“VIRTUAL CARDS HAVE PARTICULAR APPEAL to the meetings and events sector,” says Citi’s Morgan Salmon. “They allow organisers to set budgets and to dynamically change them. Within our platform, a meeting organiser can set up a virtual card for an event approved for Ð16,000 and, if later they need more money and can gain approval internally for Ð20,000, the card


In association with


can be changed to allow that project to stay within budget.” Either one card can be used for the entire event or individual cards can be raised for each transaction – florist, caterer, hotel for conference space and so on. “And within each of those the meeting number, the organiser who is running it, the theme of the event and any data that goes along with that transaction


can all be identified for easy reconciliation later,” Salmon says. “Handling reconciliation is a lot easier than it used to be, when organisers had some things on invoice, some on physical card and all these receipts had to be collected and married up with spreadsheets.” Citi is integrating its virtual card platform into the systems of two clients to


help them handle meetings and events outsourcing. “So if our client uses Cvent, for example, Cvent can leverage the platform to make card payments on our clients’ behalf,” says Salmon. “This makes reconciliation for the client a lot simpler and gives Cvent easier access to payment – and the whole thing is automated through their platform.”


BBT CORPORATE CARDS SUPPLEMENT 2016 15


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