U.S. Bank commercial card clients now can take advantage of the bank's FlexPerks Travel Rewards program, previously available only to consumer-card holders, the bank announced Monday. The FlexPerks Corporate Rewards program shares the same currency and redemption structure as the consumer FlexPerks Travel Rewards Visa Signature card and is available for the bank's Corporate Travel, Executive, Executive Platinum and One cards, according to the bank.
"We saw a lot of demand from customers in the middle market for this sort of offering," said U.S. Bank corporate payment systems business president Kurt Adams.
The annual fee per cardholder to join FlexPerks Corporate Rewards is $80, which an organization can elect to pay on behalf of cardholders, "or more commonly the individual will pay," according to U.S. Bank travel product manager Mary Miklethun, Cardholders earn one FlexPoint per $1 spent using the card. Organizations can either redeem points at the individual employee level or pool points at the corporate level "to be redeemed at the organization's discretion," according to the bank. Air travel rewards begin at 20,000 FlexPoints for tickets worth up to $400.
Large corporations that typically qualify for significant rebates can have both the rebate program and the rewards program, said Miklethun. U.S. Bank will deduct a percentage of an organization's rebate to pay for the program. The percentage is dependent on the size of the client's program and its negotiated rebate, said Adams. As rebates tend to be lower for midmarket companies, Miklethun said those organizations can choose between the rebate or the rewards program.
"If [the company] has a rebate in place, then we'll deduct a fixed cost per point on the rebate," said Miklethun. "The point about flexibility in the middle market is that it becomes a choice of whether they want a rebate or reward points in the program."
Many organizations in the middle market, according to Adams, don't have a rewards program, with or without a traditional cash rebate. “So this would be an option if they don't have anything in place, other than using personal cards and then reimbursing employees for travel," Adams explained.
U.S. Bank wanted to wait for the consumer program to "mature" before rolling out the program to corporate space, Adams added. While the corporate program is new and no clients officially have signed up for it, he said the bank has a "significant backlog" of interested clients. U.S. Bank previously didn't have an official rewards program for corporate clients, although it did offer such perks as complimentary passes to airport lounges, according to Adams.