Steve Abrams
MasterCard Worldwide in recent months announced alliances with automated expense reporting vendor CyberShift and meeting technology providers eTouches and Worktopia. In addition to special pricing, MasterCard said the new partnerships would provide "greater control, efficiency and transparency" to corporations. In an interview with Management.travel, MasterCard global commercial products group executive Steve Abrams explained the corporate card strategy to broaden its product offering through such alliances. As part of this vision, Abrams said, corporations would benefit from MasterCard's acquisition earlier this year of payment technology provider Orbiscom Ltd., with which it created the advanced authorization, transaction routing and alert control system inControl. An excerpt follows.
Can you explain the strategy of your new referral agreement with expense vendor CyberShift?
What occurred about 18 months ago [the economic downturn] gave everybody a wakeup call that we have to start focusing outside our core products and really focus on all the needs of our customers [banks] and their customers and employees. Looking at how to put together an end-to-end solution--to help corporations be more efficient, reduce expenses, get more control, get more information and be more knowledgeable about how they are spending money--it was obvious that we couldn't build everything ourselves. There are a lot of expert companies out there that have new technology, so we said, "Why don't we take a look at who's best in breed, establish an alliance with those companies to meet the specific needs of our issuers and their corporate customers, then really understand how best to integrate all those services with what we have to offer and allow our issuers to provide to their customers one means of access to get an end-to-end solution." By the same token, we're continuing to upgrade and expand our homegrown suite of expense management solutions.
How could the meeting technology partnerships deliver value to meeting card customers?
One of the not very well-known features of inControl is that during the authorization you could actually enter a variety of enhanced data about a particular transaction and have that carry through the whole process. That's something we're looking into specifically in the meetings area and building those requirements now. Some information, such as account data, meeting attendees or billing, just hasn't appropriately been captured at the point of sale. [Marcie Verdin, large and middle market segments group head, added: One of the gaps today in reconciling payments and the reason that payments are still manually processed is that meeting planners and accounts payable people don't feel comfortable paying until they've reconciled everything. If we can leverage the capabilities of the meeting software and carry that information with the payment, it eliminates the need to do some of that reconciliation and/or shortens the timeframe to use a card in that environment.] You might see some horizontal integration with other means of meetings that aren't necessarily face to face, too. It's just a matter of integrating a remote and a face-to-face solution.
With the economic downturn and subsequent reductions in corporate travel, how do you grow your business and help your issuing banks grow accounts and transactions?
Like all other areas of corporate expense right now, you're taking a really hard look at what's really necessary, what's overkill and what shouldn't be spent. Once you get down to becoming as efficient as possible, the need to do business doesn't go away. As the economy grows, as our respective issuers start to grow in their business, the demand for meetings will increase, the need for corporate travel will expand. I just think we're in a little bit of a trough right now. But the good news is that our particular suites of services and how we're dealing with corporate payment solutions in general are talking right to the needs of companies right now. They really need to better understand how they're employees are spending money so they can get themselves into the best position to more efficiently grow over time.
Some financial reporting are indicating improved conditions this fall. Have you seen an upturn in corporate billings yet?
Absolutely, in the last four to five months. I've been traveling and I can tell you just by looking at the planes, trains and automobiles that everything is packed. The average transactions have obviously decreased. But when we look at growth, the growth in the number of transactions are exceeding the growth in volume, which tells you that things are coming back, but the price is depressed.
On the consumer side, MasterCard has invested in mobile technologies that allow customers to use mobile phones to pay for purchases at retail stores. Within corporate payment, where is the potential use for such technologies?
On the other side of mobile payment is receiving alerts when employees are upgrading at a hotel or doing things that maybe they shouldn't be doing. Or if you're a small business, you want to understand when your employees are expending certain dollars for travel-related services. Alerts would be something within mobile. We have the capability today within inControl, but we haven't packaged it. An issuer hasn't requested it, but it's something we have. I would call it a work in progress.