AirPlus announced plans to launch this summer a multinational corporate payment alliance with four financial services institutions: BNP Paribas of France, the Nordic region's Nordea, Santander of Spain and Switzerland's UBS. AirPlus will provide the lodge card product and also be the corporate card issuer in Germany and the United Kingdom, while the others will serve as issuers in their respective home markets.
Santander also is a major player in Latin America, and AirPlus executive marketing director Spencer Hanlon insisted that the "NextGen" alliance would be global, despite all founding members being European-based. "This is the beginning of a journey," he told BTN. "We would expect more partners to be announced in the near future."
International issuer alliances thus far have made little headway in the corporate market; potential customers have failed to see additional value when compared with an ad hoc collection of issuers. Hanlon said that although NextGen is not a joint venture, it will be a much more cohesive partnership than other alliances, offering a single contract, a single contact and, above all, consolidated data pulled together by AirPlus. NextGen will use the AirPlus Information Manager system, which AirPlus already uses to merge its own management information with that provided by clients' other card providers.
According to Hanlon, AirPlus Information Manager consolidates AirPlus lodge card data from the Universal Air Travel Plan platform with data from various other card networks, including those offered by Visa and MasterCard. The members of NextGen are a mixture of the two: AirPlus and Nordea issue MasterCard cards while BNP and UBS are Visa issuers. Santander issues MasterCard in Spain and Visa in Latin America.
"We are providing a backbone of data to which we are adding in tailored solutions for each market," said Hanlon. "Clients can choose the best in class in each country with strong governance for implementation and service levels behind it."
According to Hanlon, multinational clients look for consolidated, cross-border data to enable more coherent and accurate negotiations with multinational suppliers, but prefer to work with leading local issuers that understand the specific conditions and demands of their own marketplace.
Hanlon added that AirPlus will assign personnel to manage NextGen. There will be three management boards for sales, operations and management governance.
The article originally was published in Business Travel News.