October 07, 2009 - Visa Inc. announced a new global information and spend management platform to provide corporate customers of issuing banks not only management reporting on card spending, but expense management across all spending categories. Powered by Spendvision, Visa IntelliLink Spend Management supports integration of non-card spend categories, including mobile phone bills or travel bookings.
The solution "provides enhanced visibility into and control over expenses, as well as easy access to information through dashboards and alerts, the ability to track both card and non-card transactions, and local and global functionality," according to Visa.
"We've been looking at information reporting, spend management, expense management, payables and all the other non-card solutions in the marketplace and there was a clear need to take the next step in spend management," said Visa Inc. head of global commercial solutions Darren Parslow. With Spendvision, he said, Visa found technology that "already exists, is truly global and can serve all of our clients" on a global basis.
The single platform, provided in a software-as-a-service, Web-based model, eventually will replace multiple Visa reporting tools designed to support small, medium and large businesses, as well as government customers, Parslow said. "Allowing our banks to get into true expense management" and providing corporate customers with a solution to pull in "non-card data in a single place for complete management reporting" is the "exciting thing" about the new platform, he said. Previously, banks and card associations have partnered with various expense providers to provide such tool, Parslow added.
Indeed, competitor MasterCard Worldwide in August announced partnerships with meeting and expense providers and for several years has partnered with TRX Inc. for data management. American Express commercial cards last year announced its partnership with and investment in Concur for expense as it terminated a partnership with IBM's Global Expense Reporting Solution.
In a white paper sponsored by Spendvision, IDC Company Financial Insights contended that "the future of commercial banking will be less about transacting; instead, it will be more about interacting with clients and providing them with more information regarding their financial transaction." In the wake of the financial crisis, "commercial banks are finding creative ways to grow their businesses and serve the needs of their commercial clients."
Echoing this view, Spendvision CEO Robert Kirby said the technology platform could allow banks "to grow their business and charge for it," instead of give it away as they did previously.
Parslow said it would be up to each issuing bank to determine pricing for the technology. Each member bank would have the flexibility to turn on as few or as many modules as a client needed to support card management and spending limits, reporting, reconciliation, receipt imaging, expense and integration to enterprise resource planning systems. Other expense applications could be integrated too, he confirmed.
As of this summer, Spendvision was building a payment gateway module to provide corporations with the ability to directly pay suppliers and "encourage employees to settle private spend directly through our platform," Kirby said. Also in development was a "module to support merchant acquiring activity for payment transactions" to be used by issuing banks. Parslow couldn't identify the Visa-issuing bank early adopters of Spendvision technology, but said: "We're definitely implementing North American banks. You will see them in the next 12 months."
Kirby in July said Spendvision was "rolling out to 130 banks around the world," excluding early adopters SunTrust, Europe's Barclaycard and Australia's NAB. Founded in Australia in 2004, the company is headquartered in the United Kingdom and majority-owned by travel management company HRG. Rapidly growing from just five employees in 2004, Kirby said, "we've been steadily building our business and understanding key needs across our three key verticals: travel, telecom and banking." Spendvision powers the HRG portal, but also "passes travel data and booking information to other TMCs," Kirby said. Within telecom, vendors including Vodafone as well as multinational corporations use the modules to consolidate, analyze and reconcile phone bills.
Spendvision as of July claimed to be supporting about 450 companies of varying sizes on expense management. The company said it supports about 600 SunTrust customers with spend and card management tools. In 2008, Spendvision "supported transactions for over 250,000 companies, almost 2.6 million users and processed some 250 million transactions." Only 25 percent of its business was generated in the United States as of July, Kirby told
Management.travel, but "we are looking to expand that to close to 50 percent by the end of our financial year."
