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Bank of America Corp. has finished moving its corporate card clients to its Works platform, the bank announced today. Works, which BofA bought in 2005 from a company of the same name, is a Web-based application that automates payment, authorization and reconciliation of corporate card accounts. BofA will shut down its older EAGLS corporate card management program, which it developed a decade ago for the cards it issued to the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as its Card Program Administrator application, both of which operated separately instead of as a single system. Kevin Phalen, senior vice president of integrated debt and treasury management products for BofA, tells CardLine BofA acquired Works because customers showed a preference for a single computer application to perform multiple management tasks for corporate cards. Aite Group LLC analyst Adil Moussa says corporate card customers have come to expect such unified, Web-based applications offering several card-monitoring and management functions from major card issuers that are also processors, such as BofA. But now that Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide have released their own versions of corporate card management programs for clients, issuers must work harder to differentiate their card-management tools from those of the card networks. "There is more and more competition by Visa and MasterCard with their own (card-issuing) clients," Moussa says. Phalen says BofA directs its smaller to mid-sized corporate card customers to use MasterCard and Visa corporate card management programs, but it suggests larger corporate card clients use Works, which is designed for multinational organizations with cardholders and operations in several countries.
