Trying to get back to business as usual after the Wal-Mart settlements, MasterCard International sponsored a New York seminar to get more businesses to use commercial card programs.
At the seminar last week, a MasterCard corporate card customer, American Electric Power of Columbus, Ohio, described its experience with a Bank One Corp. program two years ago. The utility, which operates in 11 states, has distributed about 10,000 commercial cards to its 22,000-person labor force.
Steven B. Quincel, the accounts payable project administrator at American Electric Power, said it had tried different employee expense programs - from a purely paper-based system to one with 10 different cards, some for travel and entertainment, others for procurement.
In 2001 it settled on Bank One's One Card, with back-office software from Necho Systems Corp. of Toronto. Necho's products are designed to send information about card transactions directly to a company's general ledger, red-flagging any personal or unusual transactions.
Mr. Quincel said that the new system has saved money and that computer-based access to data about card transactions has given the company a more accurate view of how much it spends on travel and entertainment and on procurement.
When its system was paper-based American Electric estimated that it spent $17 million on travel, Mr. Quincel said. After it switched to an automated card-based system it found that the real number was $22 million, he said. The new system also caught some people using their business cards for personal expenses, Mr. Quincel said.
Philip J. Philliou, the vice president of global e-business at MasterCard, said the current regulatory climate makes it more important than ever before for companies to document expenses. "Providing an audit trail and near real-time dates is front-of-mind of almost every CFO" in the country, he said.
One executive who listened to the pitch was Ken Schomaker, an assistant vice president at Hudson River Bancorp Inc. of Hudson, N.Y. He said his company had once used a Visa corporate card for its 700 to 750 employees but decided it was not worth the cost.
"A lot of our employees are tellers, and we wouldn't want those people using credit cards," he said.
