U.S. Bank Partners With Conferma For Reconciliation

U.S. Bank announced a global partnership with United Kingdom-based settlement technology provider Conferma to help corporate customers automate travel expense reconciliation of virtual or single-use accounts and embed necessary reporting detail into both booking and payment records. The offering could be available this summer, officials said.

Conferma's technology works behind the scenes to authorize payment via a single-use account when data required by a customer is complete, according to Conferma co-founder and CEO Simon Barker. "Having a single-use card number on its own isn't much good; it's got to flow into something. We're specialists at flowing the card numbers into the likes of the global distribution system and booking tools and then managing the back-end processes to marry the travel and banking worlds."

While U.S. Bank has its own technology to manage single-use accounts, "Conferma brings expertise in embedding [card numbers] directly within travel systems and essentially helping us distribute that broadly with suppliers and across multiple agencies to allow us to manage the financial relationships with clients," said U.S. Bank Corporate Payment Systems travel payment strategy manager and vice president Mary Miklethun.

Embedding a single-use payment number in bookings "essentially provides the key to do all the matching," Miklethun said. "We've talked to clients who spend anywhere from a day and a half to 11 days every month reconciling central bills. We see that effort completely disappearing because with Conferma's system, we can provide 100 percent automated matching of that data and allow our clients to leverage those resources for other functions."

Conferma's technology powers Sabre's Travel Settlement Services offering and is integrated into both the Sabre Red workspace and Amadeus. The technology also works with Travelport and other technologies.

"With existing central travel account or lodge processes," Barker said, "the card [number] is always available and can be used at any time. Within our process, the card is only made available when we have the right data that we need to match. We can guarantee we've got the right quality data to match the transaction to at the booking level because we won't issue the card until we get it. We can do the quality control of the data before the card is issued. It basically tells you how much more profound this process is than just a lodge account."

A U.S. Bank customer would use standard card management applications to request a pool of virtual account numbers, which would be stored in Conferma's systems until requested by a specified travel management company, GDS or other travel supplier through an application programming interface, according to Miklethun.

U.S. Bank officials last year "got to know Conferma" as the bank worked on its European card launch. "We recognized that they had a really innovative solution for centrally billed travel and bringing virtual accounts into that space," Miklethun said. "We've had a great deal of success introducing virtual accounts and single-use accounts into the market from a general payables perspective, but Conferma helps us bring that to bear within a travel process. The way it enables us to embed a payment capability right in the booking tool has enormous value" to solve customer problems with "manual reconciliation of expenses that today are either going to central travel accounts in a card program or in many cases to manual invoices or direct bills."

While a company could convert all travel cards to a single-use platform, Miklethun said, the bank is trying to help customers automate reconciliation of centrally billed or direct-billed travel expenditures. Companies that issue individual cards to employees for travel expenses often centrally bill "bigger expenses booked ahead of time, like hotel and air. It gives them a little better control and allows them to keep credit limits lower on individual cards," Miklethun said of the value proposition. In another instance, one large U.S. Bank client asked for solutions "to pay for job applicants or contractors where they don't have the employer-employee relationship to support issuance of a card," she said.

The automated payment solution also delivers value to suppliers, especially those who could use it to eliminate direct billing, Barker said. "It allows certain organizations to negotiate preferential supplier agreements because of the way they're paying," he added.

Privately held Conferma was founded in 2004 to provide automated payment processes to hotels booked in Europe, "where up to 40 percent are non-GDS," Barker said. "As the amount of content explodes within Europe, more and more direct-connects are popping up. A big part of our business is about providing that connectivity, because that's where the payment process needs to be streamlined and automated. At least with the GDS you have some control, but in the non-GDS it is a lot more chaotic. Our business model was about bringing some sort of business process improvement to that world. We started in the hard part and are working back now in the more systematic world of GDSs."

Miklethun said the technology is integrated and ready for a few pilot tests, which the bank is finalizing. "We expect to extend that pilot over a couple cycles, so 60 days, and then be ready for a broader market launch this summer."