BCD Travel will invest in virtual payment technology as a part of an expanded strategic partnership with Conferma, the travel management company announced.
The partnership brings "a shared investment commitment to enhance technology integration and co-develop new functionality tailored to BCD client needs," according to the companies. It will "place a strong emphasis on the hotel segment," according to BCD head of payment solutions Neil Fyfe, with the investment aiming to broaden Conferma's hotel payment automation capabilities and integrations to property management systems.
Those capabilities allow BCD, which has been a partner of Conferma since 2011, to enable automatic invoice intake. "Thanks to an increased integration with our hotel partners, we’ve seen an increase in card acceptance and folio collection percentage rates, expanding the data integration directly into our spend management platform—simplifying reconciliation and enhancing insights for our clients," Fyfe said in a statement.
BCD said it also plans to increase internal investment in virtual card technology, with the aim of enabling new payment capabilities, over the next few years.