Citi Moves To Ease Corporate Travel Pain

Corporate travel is about to get a lot easier for travel managers. That is, if Citi Commercial Cards has anything to do with it. Through a recent partnership with Concur, Citi is hoping to offer an enhanced reporting solution that gives businesses a more holistic view into their overall travel-program activities.

Citi Commercial Cards and spend management solutions provider Concur have struck a partnership to offer businesses a less difficult means to manage their corporate travel.

Through their partnership, the two companies will combine global data from their core travel program vendors into one series of reports. Concur will provide a simplified set of consolidated reports detailing clients’ Citi Concur, and travel agency data, according to the agreement announcement.

The goal is for organizations to gain a comprehensive view into their overall travel activities for a more thorough analysis of their program’s purchase behavior, spend patterns and overall performance, the companies said.

The enhanced travel reports will automate current manual processes, Manish Kohli, Citi’s global head of commercial cards, said in a statement. Additionally, that the reports will enable clients to make key travel decisions more quickly and with more confidence, Kohli said.

“This offering is part of Citi’s continued commitment to bring the best global products, partners, and solutions to market for our customers,” he said.

Subscribed clients can access card issuer, expense-management provider, and travel management-agency data. They also see where they can authorize Concur to receive the data and have it be formatted into a set of easy-to-read dashboards and drill-down enabled reports, according to the partnership announcement.

“As a company that shares the same global vision as Concur, and with an equal commitment to innovating to help customers, Citi is an important partner for us,” Michael Hilton, executive vice president and general manager of Concur Travel and Expense, said in a statement. “Together, we’re giving customers greater visibility into travel program spend and purchasing behavior, and the ability to gather deeper insights into overall performance.”

Corporate travel is something many organizations are trying to simplify. Last month, Concur announced a partnership with IBM to offer better cloud-based travel and expense-management solutions to consumers worldwide.

Under the agreement, IBM will promote Concur’s cloud-based management platform to its own expense-reporting solutions clients. During the transition to the new expense-management platform, IBM clients will continue to receive global process service and business process outsourcing operations support.

Moreover, as PYMNTS.com reported last week, electronic payment solutions provider CSI globalVCard recently launched a new B2B payment system. Called globalVCard travel, the system is designed to alleviate many of the corporate travel industry’s biggest pain points, including travel policies, the high cost of fraud, and the burdensome manual task of reconciling travel expense data.