MasterCard Links To European TMCs Via Dataflexnet

MasterCard Europe intensified its efforts to win business in the lodge card market last week by announcing a partnership with Dataflexnet, a specialist data consolidator for travel management companies. The deal will enable MasterCard to take an enhanced data feed from European TMCs without having to build special individual connections to each of them.

Head of large-market commercial products Rene Stynen said the feed provides "fully descriptive data," allowing clients to allocate and reconcile transactions, instead of the basic data contained in an ordinary card statement. Among the enhance data fields provided are origin and destination as well as such internal client information as employee numbers.

MasterCard in recent years has worked to close the gap with closed-loop providers like American Express and Diners Club—which are both acquirers and issuers, allowing them much tighter control over the richness and consistency of transaction data—by improving its data quality.

"This is part of our strategy to compete against the closed-loop providers," said Stynen. "A few years ago, this space was dominated by them."

Stynen described the deal with Dataflexnet as the second phase of the strategy, the first phase having been the building of direct feeds from the Big Four travel management companies: American Express, BCD Travel, Carlson Wagonlit Travel and HRG. MasterCard believes the Dataflexnet agreement will help it connect with a second tier of 10 to 20 TMCs in Europe.

"This is especially important for the U.K., which is still the most fragmented market in Europe," said Stynen. "In the Netherlands, if you cover the top five TMCs, you effectively have the entire market, but in the U.K. a fairly large part of the market is covered by 25 TMCs which are defending their share very well."

U.K.-based Dataflexnet has been trading since 1996. In addition to integrating travel invoice data into MasterCard's global payments platform, it also will perform quality control checks on transaction data exchanged between TMCs and MasterCard.