MasterCard Names New Global Commercial Exec, Enhances Global Systems

MasterCard Worldwide will lean heavily on technology to seek an edge in the expanding global commercial payments market, the company signaled with a pair of announcements this week, including naming a payments-technology guru as the new head of its global card operations.

The card brand on Sept. 30 appointed Edward Glassman, 51, group executive of MasterCard’s Global Commercial Products unit, replacing Steve Abrams, who retired. Glassman most recently was chief information officer at Royal Bank of Scotland and before that held the same title at ABN Amro. He also once headed global product development for Citigroup Inc.’s global transactions services unit and its commercial card platform and earlier in his career served for 12 years at IBM consulting on new and emerging technologies.

Glassman’s appointment follows MasterCard’s Sept. 23 announcement of a series of significant enhancements to its corporate expense-management platform, smartdata.gen2, which it originally rolled out in late 2007.

The twin announcements put MasterCard in a position to put fresh pressure on entrenched global commercial card rivals, including American Express Co. and Citibank, one analyst says .

“It appears that MasterCard is using technology to improve its global commercial card offerings, and that approach is a good one to help level the playing field, especially in the area of local issuing,” Nancy Atkinson, a senior analyst at Aite Group, tells PaymentsSource.

AmEx holds a dominant position in global commercial cards, particularly in corporate purchasing cards, largely because of its deep network of local card-issuing resources around the world. And Citi also has established local issuing in dozens of markets while increasing its business in global procurement cards, a fast-growing area of competition, Atkinson notes.

One of smartdata.gen2’s features is technology enabling commercial card issuers’ customers to conduct foreign transactions in local currencies, providing exchange-rate and other advantages without setting up local card-issuing operations, MasterCard says.

“Many smaller and mid-sized card issuers want the advantages of issuing global commercial cards in local currency without having to build out their own local-currency [services], and smartdata.gen2 enables them to do that fairly easily,” says Robert Reeves, MasterCard senior vice president and group head of commercial products.

In its latest iteration, smartdata.gen2 also enables corporations using inControl, MasterCard’s card-payments controls program, to integrate it with existing expense-management systems. MasterCard developed inControl in 2008 in partnership with Orbiscom Ltd., a Dublin, Ireland-based company it acquired early last year, enabling corporations to set specific controls on the amount, location and merchant for corporate expenses (see story).

 “The integration of smartdata.gen2 and inControl means that companies using both systems can view a variety of types of expense transactions and navigate easily between them,” Reeves says.

Additionally, Smartdata.gen2 provides automatic pre-population of expense reports as transactions are posted to card accounts, with preferred-vendor transactions and exceptions automatically flagged for managers, Reeves says.

“MasterCard is working to push commercial card transactions down to a really granular level so that corporations can control the type, location and amount of corporate spending on an individual level,” Atkinson says.

Other commercial card system operators also are enhancing technologies to serve the growing global commercial cards market.

Bank of America Corp. last year announced it is beefing up its internal operations to handle commercial card offerings for various multinational clients acquired through its Merrill Lynch merger, while JPMorgan Chase & Co. also announced plans to increase its local card-issuing operations overseas (see story).

Visa Inc. last year unveiled IntelliLink Spend Management, a commercial card reporting tool developed through a partnership with Spendvision, a United Kingdom-based expense-management software maker. Visa’s IntelliLink is gradually replacing Visa Information Source and related information-management tools the company previously offered to commercial card clients (see story).