MasterCard last month introduced a stored-value corporate meeting card, featuring elevated credit levels and the ability to track and consolidate spending data into reports, as part of an extensive suite of corporate payment options.
The meeting card aspect of that product suite—which follows in the footsteps of, but is not identical to, meeting programs introduced by Diners Club and American Express Corporate Services in 2000—includes the issuance of meeting cards to planners, usually one per planner per meeting. The company has the ability to set estimated budget levels as the credit limit to control spend. The card is accepted worldwide with any vendor that accepts MasterCard.
"This has been an area of some need in the past," said senior vice president of MasterCard Workplace Solutions Steve Abrams. "Meeting planners used corporate travel cards and were met with resistance because of credit line availability. Issuers and corporations are not crazy about temporary credit line increases—it can lead to thousands of dollars in abuse or lost cards." The stored-value option, then, increases meeting budgetary control, Abrams said. "It makes more sense with an approved budget on the card. There can be controls on daily spending and where the card can be used. It's tied to an event and you know exactly what you are spending. It can be reloaded and value can be added."
Meeting card expenditures also can be linked to MasterCard's online reporting tool, allowing for expense consolidation and, presumably, fewer transcription errors. The company had not sold the meeting card to any of its clients as of late last month, as officials noted the product had just been introduced. However, one client of MasterCard's corporate payment solutions evinced little interest in the meeting card concept.
The meeting card is one of several applications MasterCard introduced for its Workplace Solutions suite of payment products. Also included is a stored-value incentive card, designed as a reward for employees.
American Express introduced its meeting card in late 2000
(Meetings Today, Nov. 13, 2000). Amex's card, however, is not a stored-value card. It allows meeting planners to separate meeting expenses from overall travel and procurement expenses and allows spending data to be compiled and consolidated. That card program has nearly 1,000 corporate clients, said manager of corporate meeting card marketing Marie Predestin. All were prior clients of American Express' travel management and/or corporate card services, she said, though the card program is not restricted to existing clientele.
Amex surveyed about 100 of those users in September, Predestin added, and found the typical user charges about $60,000 per meeting and uses the card for more than 80 percent of meeting expenses. In addition, American Express focus group research indicated that the greatest allure of the card—as opposed to check payment—is its ability to reduce paperwork, eliminate credit applications and speed supplier payment, she said. Amex also offers the ability to see and manage the expenses online via American Express @Work.
Though Diners Club's Group Event System centrally billed meetings card has continued to grow, said director of corporate marketing Bob Byrom, its Electronic Event Account System—enabling card users to assign specific meeting transactions to different internal cost centers—has not. The latter functionality, developed in 2000 with Andersen Consulting is being fine-tuned, he said.
"We have not seen a high adoption rate of that item," Byrom said. "But we're developing phase two, and looking at beta sites now. It will be a little more automated and send the data feed to the client and prepopulate it into a meeting-specific expense report." The new application would allow users to manually break charges into 15 categories of meeting expenditures for data consolidation purposes. Though that process is not completely Web-based, Diners' Byrom said the company is planning to add such functionality, although it will release the application beforehand, likely in March or April.
Chicago-based Accenture, previously Andersen Consulting, has moved on as well, said global director of meeting and event support Tom Keville. Though the Diners Club program "went fabulously well," he said, Accenture made a companywide decision to restrict its preferred corporate card vendor to American Express, effectively ending its participation in the EEAS program. Accenture has adopted a version of Amex's meeting card product, and implemented it last month. The move represents a significant change of direction for Accenture, which by mid-2001 had implemented EEAS for more than 2,000 meetings and planned to expand the program further.