Amex Upgrading To IBank 4
American Express Interactive will begin with five clients to transition to Cornerstone Information Systems' IBank 4 data consolidation and reporting solution as part of an overall upgrade beginning this month for participating IBank users. The transition "will be slow," said Cornerstone director of decision support Aaron Hosey. "We're running more than 2,000 reports on 330,000 travel records a day and, for the new version, we've ripped out almost every system we have."
"We tightly manage our travel program and need real-time data to know where our travelers are and how we're performing on our contracts," said Lisa Stanford, travel and meeting service program administrator for ConocoPhillips. She said the company by year-end will migrate from the several products now in place, due to mergers, to IBank 4.
The system's application and user interface layers were replaced and the reporting platform enhanced, Hosey said, enabling new features, including reporting on reservation "touches," an improved travel authorization feature and broader data capture through structured connections with such nontraditional distributors as airlines and online-originating agencies.
"Amex has built upon Cornerstone's flexible travel technology and reporting tools that enable us to provide highly customized, sophisticated fulfillment solutions for our customers," said Rich Miller, vice president and general manager for American Express Online, in a prepared statement. "With this technology in place, we are able to produce some of the highest 'touchless' rates in the industry."
According to Hosey, "Our customers were not necessarily unhappy with the fees they were paying their travel management providers. They simply wanted to better understand what they were paying for so they could more accurately budget and forecast and proactively control the costs associated with travel."
In terms of accessing new sources of data, Hosey said, "We've always parsed GDS and back-office data, but that's not getting it done today. We need to address non-back-office sources and capture it with the appropriate security translation and file format models, centered around structured data." The intent is to push the data outbound to any point, Hosey added. Cornerstone said IBank 4 enables users to distribute data to travel and expense management, human resources, meeting planning, security and data consolidators.
New automated travel authorization capabilities allow IBank users to private label a portal that can feed the quality control system for ticketing or such other software as Ariba Buyer, minimizing manual agent checks while providing reason code reporting.