Citigroup Inc. on Aug. 9 announced the global rollout of the Citi Meeting card, a commercial card designed to enable organizations to more easily control and analyze expenditures for specific meetings and events.
Citi designed the card to replace the hodgepodge of paper checks and invoices and purchasing and travel-and-entertainment cards corporations typically use to pay for meetings and events, Citi says.
Companies may set up the Meeting card to harness Citi’s global Virtual Card Account platform. Introduced last year, the platform provides a broad range of flexible controls and analytic tools for corporate expenditures though card-not-present transactions (
The card is also available as a traditional plastic card. And customers may set up the Meeting card to use Citi’s recently introduced “declining balance” commercial card option so planned expenses cannot exceed specified budgets, Citi says.
Citi is offering the Meeting card to its Visa Inc. or MasterCard Worldwide commercial card customers.
Corporations typically use a combination of purchasing cards plus paper-based invoices, checks and other payment forms to plan and pay for meetings and events, Paul Horn, Citi global product manager for commercial cards, tells PaymentsSource, citing Citi’s research.
“We have found that the vast majority of meeting expenditures use multiple payment types so that on the back end it’s sometimes difficult to see exactly where the money went,” Horn says. “By combining the technology of virtual card accounts with our declining balance feature, companies can set budgets for events and make sure expenditures are conforming to those controls.”
The product’s rollout coincides with resurgence in business travel and meetings, Citi says.
“Corporate travel spending declined 20% to 30% from late 2008 through last year, but this year we have seen spending return to the levels of mid-2008,” Horn says.
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