Mastercard Augments Cards With Emburse Spend Management

Emburse is teaming with Mastercard to equip card-issuing financial institutions (FIs) with detailed spend management features. FIs that issue Mastercards can provide a tailored version of Emburse and provide a connected offering that lets businesses simply collect, verify and reconcile expenses charged to cards, according to a Wednesday (March 31) announcement.

“The potential benefits that Emburse and Mastercard can bring to banks, their clients and cardholders are immense,” Emburse CEO Eric Friedrichsen said in the announcement.

Business users can capture receipt images straight through Emburse’s mobile program, connect them with the related transaction information and send in line-item expenses minus the necessity to type in transaction information. In turn, the expense reports can be sent for automatic handling and take away the need for nonautomated reconciliation.

Moreover, the technology allows clients to harness audit and insights functionalities based on artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the user experience, control expenses and decrease fraud.

This connected offering lets FIs provide business customers with “sophisticated” and “unified” expense management functionality, which it says is a “compelling advantage against new market entrants in the spend management space.” As a result, FIs can win new customers, keep the clients they have and power incremental card spend.

“Through our partnership with Emburse, we’re helping financial institutions deliver a sophisticated digital solution to help companies of all sizes modernize their expense management processes and maximize efficiencies,” Ron Shultz, executive vice president of New Payment Flows, North America at Mastercard, said in the announcement.

The news comes as Emburse has bought DVI (Data Visualization Intelligence) to expand its expense management analytics functionalities for companies. Terms of the deal were not revealed in a March announcement.

DVI’s infrastructure allows organizations to create analysis from an array of travel expenses such as flights, hotels and rental cars, including trips arranged for by a travel agency and those reserved beyond a company’s approved tools.