MasterCard Worldwide last month announced it had reached a deal with the global distribution system Abacus International to provide corporate travel data in the region.
Abacus, the region's largest GDS, is allied with Sabre, and the agreement nearly completes MasterCard's networking with global distribution systems in the region, said Peter Gordon, MasterCard's vice president for commercial payment solutions in the Asia/Pacific region. MasterCard also has put together agreements with Amadeus and Galileo, he said.
"What MasterCard has done is develop relationships with primarily all the GDSs," Gordon said. "Now, we're getting GDS data directly from Abacus for certain corporate customers."
The partnership allows businesses using MasterCard corporate cards to receive line-item travel expense details through Abacus' computerized reservations system. The data are available through Smart Data OnLine, MasterCard's expense reporting application.
"Our collaboration with MasterCard will benefit Abacus corporate travel agencies and travel management companies," Patrick Lai, vice president of airline marketing and North Asia for Abacus, said in a prepared statement. "These organizations will be able to better service their corporate travelers, who now have up-to-date travel information to manage their expenses."
Having a single corporate credit card still is a fairly new concept for travel managers in the Asia/Pacific region, but data availability there slowly is improving as card providers reach to satisfy clients who increasingly are moving to globalize card programs.
The agreements with Abacus and the other GDSs are only some of the progress MasterCard has made toward payment solutions in the region. The card provider recently expanded its enhanced airline data program in Australia and Singapore, and rolled out corporate card programs to several Fortune 500 organizations in China.
Other card companies have taken similar steps. American Express is set up to provide transaction-level detail captured from GDSs, travel management companies and suppliers through its own online reporting tool, American Express @ Work. In addition, American Express has developed such innovations as variance reports to help travel managers in the region.
"Variance reports are very popular with Japan-Asia/Pacific multinationals," according to Yvonne Schneider, senior vice president of global marketing for American Express Global Corporate Services. "They're an easy way for them to spot maverick spenders outside corporate air and T&E policies."
Such innovations are a response to increased demand from companies for data availability as they trend toward multinational consolidation with a single T&E card
(BTN, Feb. 6). The consolidation trend is extending to midmarket firms as well as large companies, she said.
"It's mirroring the trend in the United States," Schneider said. "What's driving these firms is a desire to have all spending consolidated, rather than using very expensive cash advances or personal cards, and the benefit there is that it becomes much easier to track employee compliance with spending rules."
Travel managers in Asia still have several obstacles to getting the full picture of their travel data, however. Part of that stems from the relative newness of credit cards—particularly corporate travel cards—to the region, Gordon said.
American Express and Diners Club have had established products in the region for decades, but acceptance still is a challenge. The region still predominantly is a cash society, Schneider said, although companies increasingly are migrating to cards as merchants adapt.
Such bank-issued cards as MasterCard are even newer to the corporate arena because the regional banks historically were reluctant to support them, Gordon said. Demand has led to the emergence of the products within the past five years, he said.
Even as acceptance grows, the quality of data remains weaker in the Asia/Pacific region. Airline data is the most readily available because the suppliers are mostly multinational carriers. Other aspects of travel data, however, such as hotel folio data, are more difficult to come by, said David Hillman, principal of Deerfield, Ill.-based Consulting Strategies.
"The data is only as good as what the merchant can provide and what the data processors can process," Hillman said. "It's a very large area covered by tens of thousands of merchants and myriad merchant processors."
The Asia/Pacific region also is behind the rest of the world in adoption of expense reporting tools, partly because of the sometimes prohibitive cost in setting up the tools in regional offices, MasterCard's Gordon said. That also has given card companies an impetus to improve on their own online reporting tools. While those solutions might not have the complex capabilities of competitive expense reporting software offerings, they are easy to implement as companies make the move to corporate cards in their Asian offices, he said.
"In the local subsidiaries or offices, probably only 10 percent have expense management solutions," according to Gordon. "It can be expensive, and this is at a minute fraction of the cost."