MasterCard eyes expansion of its travel data programme in China
Published: 25 Sep 2008
By EyeforTravel.com Correspondent, Beijing
China is considered to be an emerging market for commercial card solutions.
Currently, according to the industry experts, there is a predominance of the typical corporate card products or commonly known as "walking plastics".
"Typical customers (for such products) are foreign Multinational corporations (MNCs), large local corporations as well as small businesses, which travel internationally," according to Peter Gordon, VP, Commercial Payment Solutions, MasterCard Worldwide.
Gordon, who is here in Beijing for EyeforTravel's Travel Distribution and Sales China 2008 conference, said the MNC segment in China requires, like in the more mature markets, enhanced travel/airline data to assist with programme reconciliation, travel and budgetary management.
MasterCard has web-based reporting applications that helps corporations seamlessly organise, consolidate, analyse and manage financial data from cards, cash transactions etc.
In China, MasterCard has numerous corporations in China with access to Smart Data, which is MasterCard's proprietary web-based reporting application.
Since late 2006, MasterCard has been receiving enhanced travel data from CWT China for a number of multi-national corporations. This data is provided electronically on a daily basis through MasterCard's suite of e-solutions such as Smart Data.
MasterCard is working on plans to expand its travel data programme with other travel management companies.
Typically, the transaction data flow, according to Gordon, is as follows:
1. Post each airline ticket purchase transaction, the merchant (travel supplier) /acquirer will validate and get authorisation from the issuer. This is a standard practice.
2. If the Issuer bank captures all the enhanced travel data with the financial record, the Issuer transfers this data to MasterCard (via our secure data links).
If the Issuer does not capture and process the enhanced travel data, MasterCard can receive this data direct from the travel supplier separately and will hold this data in its global data repository. When the issuer transmits the financial transaction data to MasterCard, using data matching protocols, MasterCard will match the enhanced travel data (from the supplier) and the financial data (from the Issuer).
3. The complete travel transaction (including fare amount, taxes, passenger name, airline, class of travel, time of travel, flights # details, cost centre, trip approval # etc) is now available to view via MasterCard's Smart Data solution or MasterCard can transmit this data via FTP to corporate customer (whichever data access option is preferred).
This daily access to its expenditure provides the corporation with ability to: automate the expense reconciliation and approval processes - eliminates the pervious manual, paper based process; online update the corporation's finance system / general ledger with expenditure information; review the online management and travel management reports increasing transparency, corporate compliance with exception and other audit reporting.
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