With Fortune 500 companies spending an estimated $500 billion globally for meeting and events, the Citi Meeting Card provides a single, global solution to increase spend transparency and impose greater budgetary controls over meeting spend.

The Citi Meeting Card solution provides enhanced security and control over expenses allowing organizations to track and analyze transaction data by department, cost center, spend category and supplier. It allows for a clear, consistent picture of meeting expenses and, as with other commercial card solutions, provides greater leverage when working with suppliers.

Coupled with the globally available declining balance and virtual card options, organizations are able to link a meeting budget with a set end-date to further enhance budgetary controls. The declining balance option ensures that meeting and event budgets cannot be exceeded by reducing the available credit with every transaction that posts to the account, while the Virtual Card Account option provides added flexibility and increased control through real-time account generation and the ability to establish pre-approval parameters for every purchase.

"Building off of our experience in the Travel & Entertainment and Purchasing Card markets globally, the Citi Meeting Card brings an increased level of efficiency and control to what is a sizeable and under-measured pocket of spend," said Hubert JP Jolly, Citi's Global Head of Commercial Cards within Citi's Global Transaction Services, "Clients now have a single solution to capture and monitor their meeting and event expenses. With the addition of the declining balance and virtual card options, they can even more tightly control their budgets and ensure compliance with internal policies."

"When we presented the Citi Meeting Card program to our senior team, we were able to show how using this single payment solution would allow us to effectively identify our meeting spend across the entire organization," said Melissa Simpson, Strategic Meeting Management Program Owner, Nalco Company. "Because it aligned so perfectly with our mandate to focus on spending, we received blanket approval."

The Citi Meeting Card solution can also be seamlessly integrated with meetings management software to provide a full end-to-end meetings management solution to plan, source, pay for, reconcile and ultimately streamline meeting management requirements.

Citi Commercial Cards, is a unit of the Global Transaction Services business with issuance capabilities in over 90 countries and an extensive proprietary network of over 50 countries. The business has long been considered a pre-eminent commercial cards provider to large and multi-national organizations both in the U.S. and globally. Nearly 500 multinational corporations use its commercial cards programs at the core of their expense management strategy, making Citi a premier card issuer in terms of technology, innovation and volume. For more information regarding the Citi Meeting Card solution, please go to citimanager.com.