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Expense Suppliers To Align With Payment, Booking Tools
By Michael B. Baker
SEPTEMBER 07, 2009 --
Expense reporting tool suppliers CyberShift and ExpenseWatch.com in recent weeks have announced agreements to integrate with other suppliers in both the booking and payment spheres.
CyberShift's agreements have focused on the payment side, with deals announced with both MasterCard Worldwide and issuer BMO Spend & Payment Solutions during the National Business Travel Association International Convention in San Diego last month. Both deals focus on integrating payment data directly into the CyberShift Expense tool.
The agreement with MasterCard allows the network's issuers to offer CyberShift Expense to their corporate card customers with the integration of MasterCard's data—including electronic folio data from approximately 12,000 hotels—in place. Steve Abrams, group executive of global commercial products for MasterCard, said the network at one time had considered developing its own expense tool but ultimately decided the alliance with CyberShift was more beneficial.
CyberShift and MasterCard are targeting midsize companies with the alliance but also will be able to integrate payment and expense data for large and multinational companies, the two parties said.
Additionally, CyberShift has partnered with MasterCard issuer BMO Spend & Payment Solutions. The Toronto-based BMO has invested heavily in recent years to grow its presence in the U.S. travel and expense industry, and CyberShift is only the latest in a number of vendor partnerships the issuer has announced, including a deal with Ariba last year (BTNonline, Aug. 11, 2008).
Terry Wellesley, managing director of BMO Spend & Payment Solutions, said the combination would "give employees, managers and organizations a sure-fire vehicle to submit, approve, certify and receive reimbursement in record time." This also marks the first such partnership with a card issuer for CyberShift.
"This is our only partnership at a strategic level," CyberShift CEO Robert Farina said. "We've integrated data with other providers in the past, but they haven't been a product-integration type of partnership."
Meanwhile, expense management supplier ExpenseWatch.com in recent weeks has announced partnerships with three booking tools for data integration: Travelocity Business, Egencia and, most recently, TRX's ResX tool.
The Travelocity partnership, announced Aug. 19, will allow expense managers to monitor booked travel versus expensed travel on ExpenseWatch.com reports, aided by Travelocity's tools to direct travelers to preferred suppliers and policy adherence.
ExpenseWatch.com president and CEO Bill Vergantino expects the integrated tools to be available during the first weeks of October.
The Egencia partnership, announced a week prior to the Travelocity integration, accomplishes a similar end, boosted by Egencia's tools to enforce corporate travel policies, according to the companies. Similarly, the ResX partnership, announced Aug. 25, will allow travel managers to apply policies and controls from booking to the filing of the expense report, cutting opportunities for policy violations and fraud, according to the companies.
According to Vergantino, ExpenseWatch.com, like CyberShift, would continue to pursue the partnership route rather than merging booking and expense reporting capabilities into a single tool to target companies with small to medium travel budgets.
ExpenseWatch.com is one of the few companies to actively court companies with as few as 50 employees, he said.
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