JP Morgan's Commercial Card Solutions unit today announced that its client, the Department of Energy, has expanded its GSA SmartPay2 charge card program by enabling one of its major contractors, CH2M-WG Idaho, LLC (CWI), to use J.P. Morgan's Single-Use Accounts solution to make electronic card payments to its vendors.
As a result, CWI pays vendors more quickly, continues to reduce its paper-based payment processes, further increases payment security, and reaps the benefit of collecting financial rebates. CWI expects to have more than 100 of its largest vendors accepting Single-Use Account payments by year-end.
The Department of Energy, through CWI, is the first agency within the GSA SmartPay2 program to leverage J.P. Morgan's Single-Use Accounts (SUA) to increase financial rebates and further streamline procure-to-pay processes. SUA helps expand CWI's SmartPay2 program participation by including large-dollar payments. In addition, CWI has found SUA to be an easy-to-adopt alternative to check, ACH and wire payments.
J.P. Morgan's SUA is an electronic payables tool that provides customers with the flexibility, float and rebate of a purchasing card while delivering powerful security, antifraud and reconciliation features. SUA can be used to streamline the accounts payable process by providing an electronic replacement for paper check payments. In addition, SUA can be used to execute payments for core business processes such as eProcurement, B2B travel payments, warranty or insurance claims or other critical business activities. With SUA, instead of having a general virtual account number for all of an organization's charges, the payee receives a unique 16-digit account number for each single payment with purchasing controls embedded in the system. This account number is active for only a defined amount and time frame and is electronically matched to pre-purchase information.
"By using SUA, our purchasing agents and payment managers do not have to worry about unapproved spending or overcharges," said Glenda Arave, Purchasing Card Organizational Program Coordinator (OPC), CWI. "Reconciling each SUA payment to the original purchase request is automatically performed through J.P. Morgan's PaymentNet account management system and CWI's internal accounting system. SUA also streamlines our accounting processes as it helps eliminates checks, postage and manual payment reconciliation."
"SUA brings great benefit to government agencies as you can take payments that were historically made by paper check or ACH and move the spend to the GSA SmartPay2 program. It is a simple way to dramatically increase program spend volumes," said Molly Walsh, managing director, GSA Program, J.P. Morgan. "J.P. Morgan also brings an added benefit by working with agencies to analyze accounts payable processes, identify vendors willing to move to electronic card payment, and thus earn higher rebates."
While CWI has not made SUA mandatory for its vendors, it has become the preferred method to pay vendors in its accounting system, and the company is encouraging new vendors to accept SUA as their payment method.