American Express Corporate Services this month expects to introduce a supplemental accounts feature to its popular corporate meeting card, allowing corporations to link several account numbers to a single card.
The new feature will allow meeting card customers to segment charged expenditures by department or planner, while consolidating all meeting expense data in a single point.
"We'll offer additional account numbers within a meeting card, and you can bucket those expenses," said Amex manager of corporate meeting card Marie Predestin. "You can see all the expenses on all accounts. If you have five planners who each plan six meetings annually, you could give each of them six cards—one per meeting—and bucket individual meetings on individual numbers, or you could have a different account for each department or planner."
Under the previous terms of the corporate meeting card program, planners tended to have only one card, Predestin said, requiring them to separate expenditures by meeting or by department off the statement during the reconciliation process.
The decision to offer the feature grew from client focus groups and requests to account managers, Predestin said: "It's a response to the market."
The move is one of the more significant Amex has made to its meeting card program, introduced in late 2000
(Meetings Today, Nov. 13, 2000). The card has grown in prominence throughout the industry, with what Predestin said are several hundred corporate customers and annual increases in new clients, as well as charged volume of more than 60 percent.
One key to American Express' effective cornering of the market thus far has been the lack of consistent competition. Both Diners Club and MasterCard have introduced meeting card programs, but Diners' Group Event System has not overpowered the market. Additionally, Diners' Electronic Event Account System solution, which was developed in 2000 with Accenture to give meeting card users the ability to assign specific meeting transactions to different internal cost centers, is being reengineered.
While the Diners Club solutions actually predate American Express' by a few months, they have not found the same level of success. However, company officials have said Diners Club is in the process of developing an automated solution that would prepopulate spending data into a meeting-specific expense report.
Meanwhile, MasterCard's meeting solution only debuted in December
(Meetings Today, Jan. 20). That product, unlike Amex's, currently only is applied as a stored-value card or a declining-balance card. It is part of MasterCard's Workplace Solutions suite of employee payment programs that also debuted in December and includes, among others, payroll and incentive cards.
Those solutions, said Patricia Goulet, MasterCard vice president of research and development for the company's global product development division, are driving the product more so at this time than the meeting card.
"It's still early to tell, but payroll is the topic of the day," Goulet said. "We see the volume, and the opportunities are tremendous. It's likely that a stored-value card, like the meeting card, will prove to be the strongest and most steadfast."
Though Goulet would not divulge any potential timeframe for further meeting card development, she said the likely next step would be to improve the card's budgeting and reporting capabilities. "The corporate card is traditionally a back-end, post-transaction tool," she said, "but the meeting card could eventually be used for budgeting purposes."