Carlson Signs Up Clients For New Corp. Card

A year after announcing plans to launch a new corporate card, Carlson Wagonlit Travel has landed more than 30 corporate clients with volume of over $200 million.

Although unable to reveal specific clients at press time, Carlson Wagonlit Travel president and CEO Travis Tanner said the company would talk more specifically about the card in April or May.

The only disappointment, Tanner said, has been the fact that executives have been unable to make it a global card as quickly as they had hoped. But Ed Surko, director of the global payment systems division, is optimistic that a solution will be available in the major markets of the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy by year-end.

Carlson expects cards to debut in Canada by April, according to Pat Coll, president of the Carlson-Household Credit Services joint venture, based in Las Vegas. Household is the issuing bank in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Elsewhere, Carlson is seeking either a bank that has broad reach to issue cards in multiple markets or individual banks to partner with in each market, Surko said. While officials want to roll the card out in the United Kingdom as soon as possible, there is no definite time frame.

As all its competitors do, Carlson Wagonlit Travel is offering a full range of insurance and traveler benefits as part of its corporate MasterCard. However, the real value of its offering is in the reporting components, Surko said.

For months, Household and Carlson executives have been developing the means to take all of the credit card data and incorporate it into the InterAct reporting package and TransAct expense reporting module. Building a database to automatically separate data elements to proper categories--vendors, spending categories, cities, departments and so on--has taken hundreds of hours of programming time. Domestically, Carlson and Household have developed the database in Las Vegas. In Europe, work has begun on a database in Brussels, using data from whichever banks Carlson selects to issue its corporate card there.

"The objective has been to take the enhanced data and marry that to our reservation data, which we'll offer later in 1997," Surko said. By marrying the data, corporate customers can quickly note any unused tickets and policy violators and begin tracking trends.

Customers will have the ability to either use a reconciliation module of the software at their desktop to compare booked to charged data, or have Carlson handle the task on an outsourcing basis, Surko said.

InterAct, a graphical reporting tool that sits on the client's desktop, allows users to drill down or up to get any information they seek. Carlson clients will be able to use InterAct to review agency and card data once the reconciliation module is completed. The card module is expected in April. Using the software, corporations can pull any data elements in a matter of seconds. For example, users could view a pie chart of all airlines used globally or regionally, then drill down to see airlines used by certain departments or even individuals.

"We offer all the standard reports, but InterAct offers the ability to mine the information and really use it to help managers understand aspects that impact their job or strategy," Surko said.

The final component is expected later this year as Carlson completes programming to allow all the charge card data elements to prepopulate expense reports in the TransAct module of the agency's ActOne software suite. Using this module, individual travelers can quickly itemize costs, add any out of-pocket expenses and file expense reports electronically for approval, payment and downloading to corporate general ledgers.

Carlson plans to build the ability to draw in data from other card vendors to its software and reporting packages for those using more than one card.