Visa USA today announced the introduction of IntelliLink, an intuitive, Web-based service designed to improve business efficiencies for government agencies by organizing data from commercial purchasing card programs into valuable business intelligence.
IntelliLink was developed to provide agencies with an easy-to-use tool to effectively manage and gain insight into their purchasing, travel and fleet card programs. The new service was designed to help clients find potential areas for cost savings - within and outside of existing card programs - and detect card misuse, allowing for quicker follow-up on suspicious or out-of-compliance transactions.
"Visa IntelliLink is an innovative tool that can help government agencies enhance the performance of their purchasing card programs by improving control and monitoring compliance, all while potentially reducing their costs of processing payments," said Darren Parslow, senior vice president of commercial solutions, Visa USA. "IntelliLink's advanced functionality gives agencies greater transparency into their usage and spending patterns, which can enhance the value of purchasing cards and accelerate the migration of business spending from paper to electronic forms of payment."
Key Product Features
IntelliLink is composed of 11 modules designed to work together or separately, and it can be customized to a particular client's needs. Key module features include:
- Reporting: IntelliLink analyzes vast amounts of data, such as transaction data, accounts payable data and enhanced merchant data, and provides increased visibility into overall spending patterns. In addition, users can easily create ad-hoc reporting to conduct sophisticated analysis. IntelliLink provides greater transparency for transactions, enabling organizations to easily identify and control transaction parameters such as amount spent, items purchased, merchant and merchant category, timing of purchase and more.
- Rules and Compliance: The service includes a misuse prevention tool, which allows agencies to set card usage rules specific to the program and enforce them via spend-limit and spend-type controls. The module detects card misuse (i.e., use deviating from specific rules), including out-of-policy spend. Diverse compliance mandates can be set into the system, which enables better management and oversight.
- Predictor: IntelliLink uses neural networking to identify new program patterns and refine and shrink misuse patterns. The tool is designed to locate complex trends beyond simple rule infringement that may or may not be misuse. Pattern recognition evolves through predictive modeling.
- Sourcing: The tool provides agencies with the ability to see and analyze their overall spending from various points of view, allowing them to identify opportunities to consolidate purchasing and negotiate supplier discounts.
IntelliLink will be introduced to government agencies later this summer in an effort to help them meet important compliance standards as part of the General Services Administration's SmartPay 2 program requirements.
The General Services Administration (GSA) estimates $1.7 billion in administrative processing cost avoidance in FY 2006 for purchase cards alone. Electronic transaction data also facilitates superior reporting and oversight of spending.