Technology Advances Open New Doors

The wealth of benefits offered by corporate cards to both employees and employers has expanded exponentially in recent years, because new technology has facilitated tremendous progress across multiple aspects of business travel.

From booking arrangements to expense reconciliation and reporting, from travel insurance to communicating with colleagues, the rise of wi-fi access and mobile applications for booking, payment and connections has revolutionised the corporate-card universe.

This has helped to boost the practice across Asia, with banks in Singapore, for example, reporting double-digit growth in take-up of commercial cards in the year to July 2014. According to one survey, sales volume on commercial cards has doubled in the past four years, with higher take-up and sales volume expected to continue increasing into 2015.

For employers, this trend has increased the user-friendliness of corporate cards, improving the prospects to capitalise on corporate discounts through volume purchases and frequent-flyer programmes, for example, together with the benefits of increased visibility of company spending: If you have more complete access to the details of employee spending, you can judge more accurately what is effective, and where economies can be achieved.

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