AirPlus
announced plans to launch this summer a multinational corporate payment
alliance with four financial services institutions: BNP Paribas of France, the
Nordic region's Nordea, Santander of Spain and Switzerland's UBS. AirPlus will
provide the lodge card product and also be the corporate card issuer in Germany
and the United Kingdom, while the others will serve as issuers in their
respective home markets.
Santander
also is a major player in Latin America, and AirPlus executive marketing director
Spencer Hanlon insisted that the "NextGen" alliance would be global,
despite all founding members being European-based. "This is the beginning
of a journey," he told BTN. "We
would expect more partners to be announced in the near future."
International
issuer alliances thus far have made little headway in the corporate market; potential
customers have failed to see additional value when compared with an ad hoc
collection of issuers. Hanlon said that although NextGen is not a joint venture,
it will be a much more cohesive partnership than other alliances, offering a
single contract, a single contact and, above all, consolidated data pulled
together by AirPlus. NextGen will use the AirPlus Information Manager system,
which AirPlus already uses to merge its own management information with that
provided by clients' other card providers.
According
to Hanlon, AirPlus Information Manager consolidates AirPlus lodge card data
from the Universal Air Travel Plan platform with data from various other card networks,
including those offered by Visa and MasterCard. The members of NextGen are a
mixture of the two: AirPlus and Nordea issue MasterCard cards while BNP and UBS
are Visa issuers. Santander issues MasterCard in Spain and Visa in Latin
America.
"We
are providing a backbone of data to which we are adding in tailored solutions
for each market," said Hanlon. "Clients can choose the best in class
in each country with strong governance for implementation and service levels
behind it."
According
to Hanlon, multinational clients look for consolidated, cross-border data to
enable more coherent and accurate negotiations with multinational suppliers,
but prefer to work with leading local issuers that understand the specific
conditions and demands of their own marketplace.
Hanlon added
that AirPlus will assign personnel to manage NextGen. There will be three
management boards for sales, operations and management governance.