American Express has long been the industry's only purveyor of both charge cards and corporate travel management services, but now overtly is leveraging both sides of the house to provide merged reports for joint customers. The reports reconcile booked agency data with billed card data and bind what traditionally have operated as two autonomous sectors within the company. The merged reports will be available to corporate customers by December through the American Express @Work tool.
"It's the same tool our customers have been using, whether they were looking at just card or just travel information," said Yvonne Schneider, Amex vice president of global product development. "Now they just go to the view when they want to see both of them together."
Amex said an advisory group of a "handful of clients" already is using the reports. American Express last month demonstrated the tool at a customer conference and also said it will use the National Business Travel Association trade show floor this week in Orlando to showcase the prototype and accept pilot requests from customers. "We anticipate a massive enrollment," Amex said. American Express will make at least one other announcement regarding card reporting capabilities at the conference
(see story).While American Express will offer the reporting function—tentatively called the American Express Variance Report: Booked vs. Billed—to joint clients, those who only contract Amex for one service most likely will not be able to access merged reports. "If we're the travel agency and card provider, which in many cases we are for global clients, it's very straightforward for us to compare the booked versus billed data. It's our data," said Mark Webb, Amex senior vice president of the global client group, which oversees American Express' top customers.
The American Express initiative also could corral customers of only one service into contracting the company for both. "In the case where a corporate card customer would want to avail themselves of this capability and we weren't the travel provider, the first thing we would try to do is point out that the only way we can do it well, precisely, accurately and in a timely manner would be to be the travel provider," Webb said. "I'm not saying it's impossible or we would say no, but my sense is we could not do the same thing in the same way."
American Express is the dominant provider of card and agency services to the highest travel-spending companies, according to BTN's Corporate Travel 100. Amex holds 46 percent of the market for travel management services. Of the 78 companies that named their card vendors, 52 named Amex. According to this data, at least 28 of those companies use Amex as the preferred vendor for both services, including Northrop Grumman, Ernst & Young, Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
To what extent Amex will leverage both sides of its house for future endeavors remains to be seen, yet Webb said its position as a dual provider provides a "unique synergy that we have and, frankly, we intend to maximize that uniqueness."
Partnership Travel Consulting president Earl Foster said he was surprised Amex has not, in the past, leveraged its card and agency business in such a fashion. He added Amex's reporting capability gives travel managers, who today "have to go through a variety of sources" to reconcile booked and billed data, the chance to accomplish that end much easier. "That's been difficult and this is a good thing if Amex is starting to do that," he said. "It's the right direction."
Amex claimed the merging of booking data with card data—often an elusive conquest for travel managers—will aid in cost containment and traveler compliance by bridging the gap between what travelers book and what they ultimately spend. "This addresses at least two important needs," Webb said. "First is cost control, which everybody is still doing in a big way. So where there are significant gaps and the billed amount is 20 percent or 30 percent more than the booked amount, chances are you've got a cost problem; second is compliance and control. This tool will help people understand where they might have a gap in compliance by employee, and they can figure out if it's simply an administrative issue or if they've got a significant compliance gap."
Lorraine Rostanzo, director of global travel at Columbia, Md.-based W.R. Grace & Co., who has seen examples of the new reports from American Express, implemented the company's services for both corporate card and travel more than 10 years ago. "As it relates to reporting, this is the first time they've been able to do anything leveraging the card and travel data," she said.
Rostanzo said in the past she would attempt to reconcile manually—and from disparate data sources—card transaction data with agency data. "In order to get the report that I was running myself, it would take me hours," she said. "Periodically, I've done that because when we were looking at opportunities to save money in the travel program that was one way to do it."
Yet, one travel manager that contracts Amex for card and agency in the United States is waiting to see if the integrity of the data delivers on the promise: "It would be of value if the reporting had integrity, but Amex probably has the worst reporting in the industry in terms of veracity and integrity. You'll get information in the same system in different ways that won't foot. If they're taking this opportunity to overhaul their own reporting system and debut their new functionality, it's a great thing. Otherwise, it's more smoke and mirrors."
While Amex bills the new reporting function as a benefit of using the company for card and travel management, travel managers noted other benefits.
"The more business you do with a supplier, the more it will be beneficial to both them and you," Rostanzo said. "Are there incentives that could be worked into using them for both? Absolutely. Whether those incentives come back as rebates or other products and services is for the person to decide."
Foster agreed. "There are benefits in the rebate because you're putting all your volume in the one spot versus splitting it up," he said. "You have a larger negotiation stand with the two."