MasterCard Worldwide announced enhancements to the MasterCard smartdata.gen2 expense management platform, providing advanced capabilities designed to drive greater control and increase cost savings for businesses of all sizes.
New features include an enhanced expense reporting module, enabling companies and employees to seamlessly review and approve expenditures, online statements, receipt management, and data integration with the MasterCard inControl platform, which allows businesses to create Single Use Account numbers, and utilize rules-driven transaction controls and spending alerts.
The new release not only strengthens current capabilities, but also provides companies with greater expense control and insight by automating and streamlining the workflow process for creating, submitting and approving employee expense reports. MasterCard SmartData serves 150 issuers and 466,000 companies in 53 countries, in all market segments as well as local, state, and federal government agencies.
"The enhancements of MasterCard smartdata.gen2 empower companies by providing them with a thorough view of their corporate expenses to enhance their control, save money and get smarter about compliance," said Robert Reeves, Senior Vice President and Group Head, Global Commercial Payments, MasterCard Worldwide. "This advancement provides powerful business intelligence by integrating reporting views and insights, as well as leveraging transactional and enhanced data procured from travel agencies and other merchants."
MasterCard smartdata.gen2 - a proprietary, Web-based expense and information management solution - has a customizable, modular and scalable design that can be easily configured to support multiple commercial card programs and market segments. This also provides benefits to commercial card issuers, who can meet the needs of their various customers globally with a world-class, cost efficient, turnkey product with regular enhancements. Through this platform, commercial card customers have access to various expense management modules and are able to analyze employee card spend at multiple levels to obtain a clear picture of spending patterns, volume, frequency, and cost-saving opportunities. unities. ng opportunities. These levels range from broader segments - such as department, supplier and hotel chains - to more granular details - including hotel folio, airline flight segments and invoice line items.
Some of the new features available on MasterCard's smartdata.gen2 include:
* Enhanced expense reporting - creates a flexible and streamlined workflow process for both the manager and employee when preparing and approving expense reports, including facilitating multiple levels of approval.
* MasterCard inControl integration - provides access and reporting from within smartdata.gen2 to data generated by inControl, a separate MasterCard solution used by companies to create Single Use Account numbers, set spend controls and limits and define alerts.
* Easy receipt upload functionality - gives the cardholder the ability to upload receipts to be attached with the corresponding smartdata.gen2 expense report.
* Online account maintenance - enables companies to send cardholder account change requests - including new card requests - to the issuer for those companies not using smartdata.gen2's real-time self-service module.
* Paperless statements - permits convenient access to the issuer's card account statement in a PDF format, allowing for the elimination of paper statements.
MasterCard's smartdata.gen2 Ranking High in New CSC Industry Survey
According to the 2010 CSC Global Survey of Corporate/Purchasing Card Expense Management Systems (EMS) - an independent CSC industry study commissioned by MasterCard - the smartdata.gen2 solution is credited with offering industry-leading features that provide its users access to a world-class EMS solution.
"MasterCard's smartdata.gen2 offers 'Best in Class' capabilities in overall functional categories, including multinational capabilities, analytics and reporting, and transaction and data management," said Rob Reti, Research Director for CSC in financial services. "Recent upgrades have strengthened current features, as well as created an even more usable and flexible platform for the future. In addition, MasterCard's reliable upgrade schedule and commitment to industry research should help the platform maintain a market leadership position in the EMS solution market."
Additional CSC study findings include:
* The MasterCard smartdata.gen2 solution is a top performing Expense Management System platform and a leader amongst its peers of globally available solutions.
* The strengths align very strongly with the key operational priorities of both users and issuers across the corporate card industry.
* MasterCard has a particularly appealing offering to its issuers, including standard, co-branded and total white-label versions of its solutions customized to specific market segments.
* Key strengths include global coverage, multinational capabilities, analytics and reporting.