Amex Aligns Meeting Card W/ Expense System For European Offering

American Express and online meeting management platform provider Travent have launched a joint product that they claim automates expense reconciliation for meeting planners for the first time. MeetingView Express adds Amex's Corporate Meeting Card to Travent's solution to allow planners to allocate each expense to specified budgets as they enter the system.

Travent is the European franchise of the fast-growing U.S. meeting management solution OnVantage. Yesterday's announcement also marks the launch of Travent and of Amex's Corporate Meeting Card in the European market. The pairing of the two initially only will be available in Europe. However, Amex head of commercial card for the United Kingdom and Benelux Paul Abbott said: "This could lead to releases in other markets."

Travent provides numerous automated functions for meeting planners. These include an online venue and supplier database, automated requests for proposals and a variety of booking tasks, such as pairing up roommates and linking to corporate air reservation tools. Travent and Amex claim that the automated expense reconciliation gained by adding the Amex meeting card will help planners track spend by event, cost center, budget line or other desired criteria. The two companies said MeetingView Express also will eliminate manual spreadsheets for tracking budgets and generate management information for vendor negotiation.

"The final element of end-to-end meeting planning automation is now in place," said Travent managing director Ray Thackeray. "For the first time, a meeting planner can reconcile expenses online in the same way as a traveler."

Abbott added: "If you stand at a meeting planner's desk today, you will see a big pile of invoices that have come in from suppliers. They are difficult to reconcile to different cost centers-we estimate it takes up 20 percent of the planner's time. Now all the planner has to do is click on to the charge and drop it into the correct cost center."

MeetingView Express initially is being made available in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden.