What Retailers Are Really Thinking about Your P-Card Program

At the NAPCP Regional Forum in Boston last month, PYMNTS.com sat down with Irene Connolly from Talbots. The national women’s clothing chain recently switched over to a P-Card program. Irene shared her thoughts on some of the initial opportunities and obstacles the program presented, as well as how she feels FIs could better cater their P-Card solutions to fit merchants’ needs.

(Product Profile: NAPCP Services)

PYMNTS.com: What are you working on right now?

IRENE CONNOLLY: We just brought our program up, starting with the travel card. We’ve gone to a corporate pay travel card – a one-card program. So, the first step was the travel. We’ve now brought that in. Our software is able to automate and bring it all through to our GL pretty easily. I think that’s the most direct way, and you can still keep control over the spend. We’re able to lock down the MCC codes to hotel, rental card, airfare, so really keep it tightly controlled… and not want to have open credit cards, ’cause the corporation is liable for the spending.

PYMNTS.com: What was the driving factor behind Talbot’s P-Card program launch?

CONNOLLY: I don’t know that we had a problem, but we were putting a new software system. We had educated ourselves on the software system. One of the solutions was to have a corporate card – whether it was corporate paid or employee paid – but to have all of the credit card transactions be imported into our software system. So as employees travel, to record their travel expenses, they would just need to bring in and provide the receipts, set them up for audit, so just automate that flow or data so the corporation would have visibility into those expenses as soon as they happened.

PYMNTS.com: Who are your current partners in this venture?

CONNOLLY: Oracle and HSBC – they were already our bank.

PYMNTS.com: As a retail company, what advice would you offer to FIs seeking to reach out to merchants about engaging in P-Card programs?

CONNOLLY: I think it’s really to educate, how to simplify, automate… there’s so much paper involved. So many hands have to touch all these transaction. If [FIs] can figure out the flow of data from the bank into the accounting system and so how to get it… it’s really about getting the education from the banks. They have all these products but yet allow corporations to maintain control over the spending. Right now, we have all front-end approvals where we’ve got requisitions and purchase orders from all our spending on the front end. The P-Card is really about getting approval on the back end, so it’s about setting up the right controls and understanding the corporate structure and the culture.

PYMNTS.com: Any future plans for expanding the program?

CONNOLLY: We’ve started a P-Card committee, and our bank said, can we be part of it? So we’re just brainstorming some of those noisy transactions, figuring out when you have your bag of tools – your checks, your direct deposit, your ACHs and your credit cards – where does it fit in? It’s a new committee. We’ve got internal audit, accounts payable, procurement, IT, and now, the bank. So, I think we got all the right people in the room, and I think the bank’s willingness to participate will be helpful.

We are now piloting some operational expenses that are high-volume, low-dollar. We’re going to pilot those and try to get some learnings from that to figure out how to keep the control over… but they’re expenses because they are high-volume, low-dollar, and sometimes, they’re painful. They cost a lot of money to process and what’s the value we’re getting? From a financial reporting purpose, a lot of people have to get involved to make it happen. Maybe the purchasing card is the better solution.