How to effectively manage your corporate card programme

How you can improve your corporate card programme?

The message from our customers and partners is clear. In a cost-of-living crisis, the value of a corporate card comes more sharply into focus. For your company, it’s a way to optimise your working capital while simplifying your processes. For your people, it’s relief from the burden of borrowing from personal funds to cover upfront work expenses.

So what trends are we seeing in corporate card programmes? And how can companies get their programmes working harder for their employees and the bottom line?

Utilise your lines of credit for bigger returns

The optimal way to pay for corporate spend will depend on your organisation – size, footprint, use of contractors, number of travellers and so on. However, in principle, the more you can utilise your lines of credit, the bigger the returns.

We know the cost of capital has massively increased. Arranging a short-term loan isn’t as attractive as it used to be. Tight on cashflow? Then using your corporate card programme could be the best option.

And while in the past, a corporate card might have been a privilege reserved for the top team, this too is changing. Even during the pandemic, we saw a shift – sometimes an uptick – in corporate card spending as employees used cards to buy the equipment they needed to work remotely.

Increase your corporate card ROI

We suggest, where possible, moving a larger volume of spend to corporate cards – by rolling them out to more employees, in more countries, and for more cost centres and categories, not forgetting ad-hoc purchasing and procurement.

One issue to bear in mind is rebates. In the UK, regulations around interchange arrangements have tightened [1]. So if your levels of rebate are lower than you expect, take another look at thresholds and how you can encompass more payments, including B2B transactions.

Payment card visibility to ensure compliance

One major benefit of a corporate card programme is better payment visibility to help prevent fraud and ensure compliance. Companies can even have a better control of employee spend by working directly with their bank (where supported) to configure pre-spend limits, automate data-feeds, and define the list of trusted merchants.

What’s more, there’s a single source of actionable data. You can monitor spending, spot trends over time, and use centralised reconciliation as a tool, for instance to negotiate deals with airline or hotel operators.

Check with your bank whether it’s connected to automated data-feeds and you will unlock all the benefits of near real-time data (such as notifications to phones) flowing between your bank and your T&E solution.

Now that open banking is here, with financial services companies, retailers and others all innovating to create new services and experiences, we expect the payment card integration service to go global.

Extend corporate card programmes for better employee experience

For employees, payments can be an emotive issue. Research [2] we commissioned found that 70% of employees are concerned with how increasing living costs are affecting their personal finances. 58% are worrying that delayed reimbursements because of poor expense processes will affect their personal finances further.

Extending card programmes will help to address these concerns, making employees feel more valued and supported.

Virtual cards are becoming increasingly more popular, making it faster and easier to issue cards, control expenditures and customise limits. By pairing virtual cards with SAP Concur, you can offer your employees a simple and secure way to cover hotel stays without using cash or their personal cards. Virtual cards are useful even for employees or contractors who rarely travel, for instance to cover any training they need.

Review your corporate card programme

We’d encourage any company to review their card programme:

• Review your needs. A good starting point is to reassess the requirements of your business and opportunities to benefit. How many employees are travelling? Do you see spend by your contractor workforce? Can you identify a long tail of supplier spend?
• Engage with your card provider. Check your options; do a cost-benefit analysis with your bank to make sure you’re getting best value. Your card programme should be paying for itself. Are you maximising your opportunities for cashback?
• Work with SAP Concur. It’s our job to help you get the most from our products and services. We want to make payment effortless for everyone, freeing companies and their employees to focus on what matters – helping people and businesses to thrive.

For more information on how integrating corporate cards and P-Cards can benefit your organisation, visit us online, or contact your SAP Concur account representative. If you’d like to find out more about this topic, please join us at Fusion Exchange.

[1] In accordance with The Interchange Fee (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, payment service providers must not request or offer an interchange fee more than 0.3% of the value of the transaction for any UK credit card transaction

[2] 2022 Expense Management in Times of Inflation Research: https://www.concur.co.uk/resource-centre/reports/expense-management-times-inflation