October 24th, 2013 by Elma Jane
Buoyed by an improving economy, business travelers are once again taking to the skies and spending more on corporate travel. The Global Business Travel Association has projected that $273.3 billion in travel dollars will be spent in 2013, and “that’s a whole lot of spending for corporate travel managers and individual business travelers to evaluate and track.”
Recognizing this problem, MasterCard launched Travel Controller on October 21. The new product is designed to give corporate users greater control over their travel expenses by directly addressing data concerns.
“Companies today are more than ever looking for more and better ways to help manage their corporate travel expense, to manage travelers that are outside of policy, and most importantly, reduce the amount of money they spend on travel.
Travel Controller is designed to be a modern solution to the problems posed by traditional lodge cards. Unlike these options, Travel Controller allows corporate users to identify individual travelers, trips and transactions, providing businesses greater insight into this spending than the available offerings that dominate the market.
Travel controller uses latest virtual card technology to generate a unique account number for each individual transaction, each hotel reservation and each ticket that’s purchased. And when its generating that card, it captures that data that’s important to the company for how they manage that.
Whether that’s the details of the transaction or things more specific to the trip or traveler or the way the company manages its budgets, all of this information is provided 100 percent of the time. This removes the headaches associated with central travel while still giving that control element that companies are looking for.
Travel Controller is around the goals of an end user organization, as a company that’s trying to manage their travel expenses more effectively.
There is a defined data set, and built in flexibility for companies to define their own customer-specific fields, that are important so that the data you get back isn’t just thousands of pieces of information, but rather its those things that are most important and its brought to you in a way that makes it easy to take advantage of.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, Financial Services, Merchant Services Account, Travel Agency Agents, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: account, addressing, amount, association, business, card, controller, corporate, data set, dollars, dominate, element, expenses, generating, global, improving, individual, information, lodge, market, MasterCard, money, policy, reduce, spend, spending, traditional, transactions, travel, travelers, trips, unique, virtual
September 27th, 2013 by Elma Jane
Mobile Payment Bandwagon
Just this month, September 2013, a number of British retailers announced their partnership with smartphone payment application Zapp, expected to launch summer 2014. Long before that, in November 2012, global coffee chain Starbucks launched a mobile payment system using Square Wallet, allowing customers to pay for their coffees with a simple scan of their smartphone. In China, the mobile payment market tripled in size over the last year, with a growing number of retailers jumping aboard the e-payments trend. Clearly, mobile payments are the new face of commerce…both for consumers and, increasingly, within a B2B setting as well. It may not be long until every type of payment…from mortgages and business loans to utilities bills and income tax…is made through mobiles.
Though it’s a trend that’s now spreading across the globe, the rise of mobile payments can be directly traced back to Africa. It’s an example of how unique conditions give rise to innovative solutions, and how those innovations catch on. Here’s a brief look at the rise of mobile payment technology and at the role Africa has played in its success.
Africa Gets There First – this notion of exchanging funds through a mobile phone really took off in Africa. When M-Pesa was launched by Safaricom in Kenya in 2007, it was a simple solution to issues specific to the region. Kenyans who lived far from banks or couldn’t afford banking fees were given the opportunity to send and receive payments through SMS messages. M-Pesa answered these specific problems, but the concept behind the service has proven to have a far broader reach. After achieving success in Kenya, M-Pesa launched in Tanzania in 2008. Despite getting off to a slow start, the mobile payment services now has 5 million Tanzanian subscribers. It has also launched in South Africa, Afghanistan, India and there’s plans to roll it out in Egypt at some point in 2013.
At the heart of M-Pesa’s success has been efficiency and security. Removing the need to travel to a bank…or even the need to log into online banking…has made the process of transferring funds far easier and faster. Eliminating the need to write a cheque, use cash or enter credit card details has made the process far more secure. Increased efficiency and improved security are qualities that everyone…not just those in the developing world…stands to benefit from.
Thus, though today’s technology has adapted and built upon the M-Pesa model, the world still has Africa…Kenya in particular…to thank for starting the mobile payment revolution.
Posted in Financial Services, Mobile Payments, Smartphone Tagged with: banking, broader, credit card, e-payments, efficiency, fees, global, innovations, innovative, messages, mobile, payment, retailers, Security, services, smartphone, sms, solution, travel
