TERMS OF
ravel managers have never had it all their own way when their company chooses a corporate payment provider. If it was just
a question of generating the best pos- sible travel spend data, the tendering process would be pretty straightforward. However, one glance at key stakehold- ers’ requirements (see p12) demonstrates vividly that an increasing number of hands want to stir the pot. Others, most notably finance, and especially the treasury department, always have had a stir, but, according to some observers, they now want to dictate the recipe as well. “For travel managers it’s tough, because they are having to spend more time managing all these stakeholders,” says Airplus International UK managing director Caroline Haywood. One new presence Haywood has
encountered in decision-making is the security department. “We now encourage customers to bring the security depart- ment into the discussion from the off, but sometimes we get blank faces,” she says. “Some of them think ‘security’ is the bloke who stands on the door, but it’s a depart- ment that can really put a spanner in the works. The boxes they need to tick are very different from those of anyone else around the table. At one of our biggest customers, the security department came in a year after the contract started and up-ended the entire programme. It took
10 BBT CORPORATE CARDS SUPPLEMENT 2015
Communication with all stakeholders is the key to success when choosing a payment provider
ENGAGEMENT T
a significant amount of time to answer all the questions before we could move on.” Security, according to Haywood, “is very concerned about what happens to the company’s data: how are we treating it at our end, what kind of digital security we are applying, and so on. In particular, they want to know where the data is stored, especially whether it is stored in the US. Many European companies don’t like that because they fear the government may
look at it. Corporate clients are increas- ingly inserting clauses about data use and protection into contracts that are totally non-negotiable.”
HUMAN RESOURCES Risk management and compliance seem to be climbing up the agenda in other ways. Haywood also detects a growing influence of human resources departments because of increasing emphasis on duty-of-care.
In association with
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