American Express is more than doubling from 39 to 80 the number of countries from which it offers detailed charge card transactional data for corporate clients.
Yvonne Schneider, Amex vice president of global product development, said that beginning early in October Amex card customers will be able to access the data from the additional countries via the America Express @Work reporting tool, as well as through a daily file of unbilled transactions.
"Currently, we offer summary data in 121 countries around the world," said Mark Webb, Amex senior vice president of the global client group. "That's enough for most companies in terms of breadth. However, today we offer transaction detail in 39 countries, which includes the major markets in the world in North America, western Europe, Asia and Latin America."
While American Express' summary data shows the aggregate picture of how much is being spent in various travel sectors within each country, Amex said the expansion of detailed data drills down to individual cardholders—showing the who, what and where of cardholder spending. "Summary data are things like how much you're spending in airlines as a category," said Webb, whose group consists of Amex's largest global corporate clients. "We could tell you in Europe you're spending $5 million in air, $2 million in car and $3 million in hotel. Transaction detail is more driven by the individual. For example, of the 100 employees you may have in Europe, here are the people who are spending in these categories, here's how much each one is spending and here are the trends and patterns."
Webb said the new countries coming onboard are "emerging markets," including Antigua, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Chile, Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and Puerto Rico.
Schneider said Amex is following customer demand for detailed data as business travel takes companies into new regions. "There's a trend with the whole shared services concept," she said. "You're seeing a large pool of research centers open up. The Latin America markets, as well as those in Asia/Pacific, are great to deploy that in. So when you start having a larger employee base in these markets, then you want to have the opportunity to understand what's going on."
One Amex card customer said her company's increasing globalization efforts have brought business and corresponding travel to new regions—increasing the need for data. "When you look at some of the countries where we're traveling to now versus where we were— especially with new companies that we've bought or for example in China—detailed reporting is going to be an added benefit," she said.
Webb said since Amex issues its own cards, the company has a data reporting advantage over Visa and MasterCard, both of which rely on bank issuers. Webb described Visa and MasterCard's relationship with their bank issuers as "a patchwork of inconsistent financial institutions all over the globe with inconsistent practices, policies, systems and operations."
Visa and MasterCard have asserted the integrity of their data for corporate customers. Yet, most U.S.-based bank issuers rely on partner banks and other financial institutions to extract data for global clients. Citibank, though, is the anomaly among the issuers as it issues cards and offers detailed reporting in 30 countries, a spokesperson said. While MasterCard would not detail its reporting capabilities, Visa reports commercial card data from 158 countries and territories.
Gary Schneider, global business manager for Citibank commercial cards, said, "If you are a U.S. bank that is not global and you want to issue a bankcard, you have to leverage an alliance with a bank in each country or multiple banks in each region. Think about the number of platforms and the number of processors. The files coming out of all of those are quite different. If you want to roll up all that data globally, the banks have to send that to the main bank in the U.S. or to the customer, who will do all the work
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