Study: One-Cards Given Thumbs Up

<B> Study: One-Cards Given Thumbs Up</B>

By Cheryl Rosen

A new study commissioned by MasterCard International from Deloitte & Touche shows nearly universal support among corporations for one-card programs, and little reason for concern over consolidating corporate purchasing, fleet, and travel and entertainment in a single card.

The study, released late last month, culls the best practices of 19 corporations and government agencies--a small sample. Still, it found that one-card programs save time and money and generally improve the quality of data available to the corporate buyer. Policy violations still are visible to senior management, and losses and fraud are no more severe with one-card programs than with separate cards for each function.

Respondents cited overall process cost and effort reduction, employee convenience of having only one card, and reductions in program administration effort and cost as the top benefits.

One-third of the companies using a one-card program separate T&E expenses by their merchant codes and pass them along to individual travelers to audit. Two have automated expense reporting systems, and one of those prepopulates expense reports for employees. Seventeen percent have programs with individual liability, where travelers are responsible for paying their own bills, while 83 percent pay bills centrally. Not one company said that consolidating card programs made it more difficult to track policy compliance and note exceptions to policy; 82 percent said a one-card program made it easier.

"Corporations are looking at putting all their corporate purchasing under the same rules and aggregating their purchasing to get the best price and service," said MasterCard senior vice president of global corporate products Steve Abrams.

For MasterCard, the point of the study was "to hear more from the marketplace. From the RFPs we've been seeing, we began to feel that the corporate market was moving toward one-card programs," Abrams said. As a result, MasterCard will move toward a more flexible corporate offering, where each customer can decide how he or she wants the three offerings to operate. The trend is clearly toward central pay with an individual bill over the Web, so employees can view all charges.