Just weeks after business process and technology management
services firm Sutherland Global Services had implemented virtual cards,
corporate travel services head Joseph Monaghan already was singing the praises of
virtual cards.
Sutherland's roughly 2,600 frequent travelers—who last year
spent $8 million on air, $5 million on hotels and $1 million on car
rentals—often travel to areas like the Philippines and India that, he said, are
not conducive to corporate cards. Fraud had been a "huge" problem, he
said. Additionally, a company policy that Sutherland shall pay directly for six-night-plus
hotel stays stifled the productivity of travel agents, who had to fax credit
card information on a moment's notice.
"We found ourselves doing a lot of faxing and direct
billing," Monaghan explained. "The card was in my name, so you can
imagine how many times our friends at Amex called me asking if I had taken a
trip to Las Vegas and spent $5,000."
At the same time, he wanted to improve the travel
department's reconciliation process. "You have a card number with a
million different stays and reconciliation becomes a nightmare. On a monthly
basis we would spend a week reconciling the file."
Monaghan needed a secure payment process that was good for
travelers while also improving agent productivity and reducing fraud. To
achieve this, the company enlisted representatives from various departments,
including accounting and actual travelers, to review the payment offerings of
existing suppliers—American Express corporate cards, Sabre as a GDS and Grasp
Technologies—and other suppliers in the market to find the best solution
without departmental or preconceived bias.
"I'm not opposed to changing GDSs or [to] Visa or
MasterCard if it makes sense," Monaghan said. "We were wide open when
we first looked at our potential suppliers."
Sutherland selected the Sabre Virtual Payments solution,
powered by Conferma, for its easy-to-use system. Agents fill in information from
a drop-down menu to create a one-time-use, 16-digit number that works only for
a specific merchant and amount and has an expiration date. One click also faxes
the reservation and card information to the hotel.
"In the new process, I not only get individual card
numbers, I get the traveler, hotel, geo codes, job codes—anything I put in the
user-defined field—and then I can move that electronically to reconciliation,"
Monaghan explained. "Now I've gone from one week to less than an hour
reconciling both air central bill and corporate card."
Sutherland has implemented virtual payments for a
100-employee division of the company and, depending on that trial, will roll it
out globally. The program seems to be going well. In less than a month, use of preferred
vendors has "gone way up," and noncompliance has dropped to 5 percent
from 25 percent.
"We improved security," Monaghan said. "It's
definitely seamless. We get more data on hotels than we ever did in the past, so
we like that a lot. We have better visibility, travel compliance and
reconciliation on all the big items."
Travelers seem to like the product, he said, but employees do
ask why they no longer receive card reward points. The company now collects those,
he said, though travelers still receive hotel reward points.
"It's going to work," Monaghan said. "It's not a perfect solution, but it's very good and it's getting better."