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MasterCard Worldwide is expanding its corporate travel and expense-management business in hopes of stealing share from market leader American Express Co., CardLine sister publication American Banker reports. Working with Bank of Montreal, MasterCard wants to deliver detailed travel data to corporate clients to help them control expenses, enforce policies, and negotiate deals with airlines and hotels. Additionally, MasterCard last week said it would work with British data consolidator DataflexNet to expand the card organization's data-transfer relationships with travel-management companies across Europe. MasterCard "has other relationships like this, on a more-global level," a MasterCard spokesperson tells CardLine sister publication CardLine Global. "This one is region-specific and helps target regional travel-management companies." The travel-and-expense initiative could open the T&E market to banks too small to compete in the past, says Steve Abrams, global product group executive for MasterCard's commercial products. Though the effort clearly targets AmEx, Abrams did not mention the company by name. "We're starting to see the value of complete differentiation versus our key competitor. That's what this is all about," he says. "The end game is one voice, one view, from our issuers to their customers." The card company plans to develop the fledgling T&E business as an open network that can interconnect to a variety of corporate and vendor technologies. AmEx does not comment on announcements by competitors, says a spokesperson. AmEx is seeing "very positive results" from its alliance with U.S.-based Concur Technologies Inc., a leading provider of T&E automation technology in which AmEx took a 13% stake in July 2008, the spokesperson adds.
