Commercial payment is a pillar of travel procurement and management. Whether using centralized billing accounts, travel and entertainment corporate cards, hotel billback or newer solutions like virtual cards, it’s all about convenience and data.
[UPDATE, Dec. 22, 2016: The U.S. Department of Justice last month filed a petition for a rehearing. It said the appeals court’s reversal relied on “the mistaken belief that [antitrust] principles cannot properly account for the interdependence” of the two sides of Amex’s platform, merchants and cardholders. Several parties have since filed amicus briefs.] [UPDATE,…
JPMorgan Chase will exit the international commercial card business at the end of the year, and that has partners and clients scrambling. Competitors including American Express and Citi stand to benefit from an unscheduled influx of requests for proposals. Unplanned is how one JPMorgan Chase corporate card customer described the situation. “We got official notice in January,” said…
[UPDATE, Dec. 2, 2016: Sabre announced that it added a virtual payment option for airline bookings within the Sabre Red Workspace, furnished with payment firm Conferma. Sabre described the new “standard form of payment” at the agent point of sale as an industry first. The integration “eliminates the need for mid/back-office providers and online corporate…
Brian Barth and his team helped reinvent travel e-commerce when they created meta-search site SideStep, acquired by Kayak in 2007 for $200 million. Now Barth is set to make an impact on payments. His latest startup, UpLift, offers real-time insight on the customer’s form of payment and enables online merchants to make targeted offers on that basis. One goal might be to…
A federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y. on Thursday ordered American Express to revise its merchant agreements. Provisions that bar merchants from preferring another form of payment need modification or elimination, the court found. Absent a winning appeal, the decision seems likely to hurt Amex’s competitiveness. It appears merchants such as airlines would be free to promote…
Corporate cards with chips finally are coming to the United States en masse. How travel departments should deal with them depends on the circumstances. Chip cards requiring a PIN for authentication are more secure and more widely accepted globally than chip-and-signature cards. But many corporate program managers aren’t getting chip-and-PIN from their payment firm. Payments industry analyst Frank…
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