Card Cos. Improve Reporting

Visa International last month unveiled its new Visa Multinational Program designed to streamline the management of travel and procurement expenses across borders. Visa said the program improves the administration of worldwide payment solutions, including enhanced, consolidated global data delivery to headquarters locations and local managers.

"What we want to do is provide an overview of the corporation's spend regardless of where it happens," said Michael Dreyer, senior vice president of commercial solutions with Visa U.S.A., based in San Francisco. "We want to make sure we have the most comprehensive possible data set."

MasterCard also is attempting to respond to its card issuers' needs for reporting to clients. The association recently added Amadeus to the list of global distribution systems from which it acquires data.

According to Steve Abrams, senior vice president and head of global corporate payment solutions at MasterCard in Purchase, N.Y., "In areas outside of the United States, you don't have the same ability to capture information from the Airlines Reporting Corp. This provides a specific amount of data with every airline transaction. What we get through ARC are the mandatory data fields we've requested, and not much on the optional side. So we'll even work with specific airlines in key markets to purchase the data. Unfortunately, it's expensive and not ideal.

"We have the ability, due to our system's architecture, to support an issuer's desire to support their corporate clients wherever the employees are," Abrams continued. "An issuer can issue out of the home country to local cardholders, but it may be desirable to issue and support locally. For example, it might be better for them to have local cards issued and serviced in Korea, so we have a program where the main American issuer has a financial arrangement with the Korean bank. At the end of the day, data are sent to our global repository in St. Louis, where we can roll it up for the issuer. I believe we have 35 financial institutions participating in more than 20 countries."

Corporate travel managers often chide the payment industry for its weaknesses in multinational reporting. In lieu of improved reporting, some bank card issuers had taken matters into their own hands.

"Visa is trying to get to a point where they can bring in enhanced itinerary information and, in turn, provide that to the issuing banks," said Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank Corporate Payment Systems president Rob Abele. "No one does it well, and I've been in the same boat as some of our competitors. Even with Amex, I've only seen glimpses. Visa and MasterCard are huge associations comprised of lots of banks. This was the very reason we said, after 10 years of banging our heads against the wall with Visa, that this has to be led by the banks."

U.S. Bank last spring established its Global Card Processing Solution, a joint venture among several multinational banks to create an infrastructure that processes their clients' multinational corporate travel data.

"If I'm the lead bank for a given client, other participating banks send data to GCPS, then consolidate it with me for my U.S. spend," Abele said. "We have built that and tested it among many partners, and we've also expanded the network. From an adoption standpoint, we're at the beginning of the curve. But we have big plans to deliver the consolidated data to certainly a handful of clients who are interested."

For JP Morgan Chase, the issue arises both as a vendor and a customer of commercial payment solutions.

"We're focusing a lot more on that, with a new organization that focuses on international delivery," said Gene Ryzewicz, a senior vice president in charge of the Salt Lake City-based commercial card business at JP Morgan Chase. "We think Visa and MasterCard have made some real strides recently on the data side."

Jim Pratt, director of corporate card services for Cendant Corp's Wright Express in Portland, Maine, observed that MasterCard and Visa are working hard. "The evolution has been that we'll capture what we can at the point of sale, then supplement that with data from others," Pratt said. "The latest evolution is that the issuers are saying our customers are not getting as much as they would like, and we'd like to supplement it. We're using what we get from MasterCard and Visa, but, of course, our customers want more data. They may not know what to do with it, but they want it."

Regarding MasterCard's effort to acquire more GDS data, a spokesperson for New York-based American Express—the market leader in corporate payment—said: "They're about nine years behind us. American Express' corporate card reporting has been providing all the data elements that MasterCard is touting, and then some, since 1993. We go beyond the data that comes through the GDS feed. We actually get some of the data directly from the airlines. That's also how we've been able to provide detailed origin and destination and air segment reporting by capturing more than the standard four segments that come through the standard ARC data feeds."

To that, a MasterCard spokesperson responded, "MasterCard has been passing enhanced travel data to Fortune 100 clients for many years and can generate the same levels of line-item T&E data as American Express."