U.S. Bancorp now offers a Visa meetings card for users of its corporate card—representing the first public introduction of meeting card functionality for Visa issuers and capitalizing on the rapidly growing utilization of meeting cards as corporate event payment solutions.
The U.S. Bank Visa meetings card essentially is an intermingling of existing corporate payment options reconfigured to serve the needs of meetings payment, said U.S. Bank senior vice president of relationships Chad Wilkins, and was designed to meet requests of the company's clients and grab a larger share of their payment business.
Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank has signed Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin Corp. as a Visa meeting card client
(see story). The card is available only to U.S. Bank Visa corporate card clients.
"We've taken corporate, purchasing and relocation cards and adjusted them for meeting planning," Wilkins said. "We've had customers use cards for meetings for at least five years, but this is more sophisticated. We've been pushing it."
The U.S. Bank Visa meeting card allows corporations to set a declining balance or charge expenditures as they occur, Wilkins said.
Visa U.S.A. senior vice president of commercial sales David Cramer said any Visa issuer may introduce meetings card functionality, but no such program has been created by Visa itself.
The U.S. Bank Visa meetings card breaks no new ground in terms of functionality or utility—and it is not sold as a product separate from U.S. Bank's other corporate payment solutions, which will limit its market reach—but the move highlights the growing acceptance of meetings cards as a key component of meetings management strategies since Diners Club and American Express introduced the functionality in 2000
(Meetings Today, Nov. 13, 2000).The current meetings card competitive landscape is dominated by American Express, which counts its number of users in the hundreds. The company has been very aggressive in marketing the card, and has signed deals with Hyatt Hotels & Resorts and Starwood Hotels & Resorts' Westin and Sheraton brands to offer master account rebates on hotel expenditures paid with its meetings card.
The Diners Club meetings payment solution
(Meetings Today, Sept. 18, 2000) has not had the same impact, though it does count Deloitte & Touche as a client. In late 2002, MasterCard debuted a stored-value meetings card as part of a suite of corporate products
(Meetings Today, Jan. 20, 2003).Many buyers have used meetings cards to automate and streamline the process of paying meeting invoices and also as a method of consolidating meetings expenditure data. However, the role of the meetings card within a corporate program can vary, often corresponding to the level of strategic management of the meetings program.
Some buyers with lightly managed programs use the card solely to make the payment process paperless. Others with more extensive management use the cards to manage data and analyze volume trends.
"We're frequent users of the American Express meeting card," said Peter Welsh, director of corporate travel and expense management services for Columbus, Ohio-based insurance and financial services giant Nationwide. "The corporate card is mandated for transient business, and we eventually will do that for the meetings business as well. It helps us capture the spending at a single source."
Officials at meetings management firms unaffiliated with corporate card providers said meetings cards have become more prominent in the minds of many of their clients.
"For smaller meetings, the card is the way to go, and a lot of companies are seeing that," said Carlson Marketing Group vice president of business development Peter Moen. "With larger meetings, there's so much scrutiny and audits and reconciliation that has to be done, but they, too, are becoming more efficient and automated."
Moen, though, cautioned against relying on meetings cards as the backbone of a larger meetings data consolidation project. "They are not the best way to track data," he said, "but they are a good way to get data into a system. They should not be group and meeting reporting databases. A lot depends on the processes of the individual corporation. There's a lot of talk about how such payment systems can be tied into [internal spending management] systems, but the meeting card system is where things are going."
"We've seen some clients move to cards, and there are growing pains, but they are pretty happy with it," said WorldTravel Meetings & Incentive's Bill Chapdelaine, who manages the company's Plan2Attend meetings management technology. "The majority of our clients still use invoices, and we don't necessarily direct them one way or another. It's a better fit for some than others."