MasterCard, CyberShift Announce Alliance for Expense Management

The solution will enable corporations to enhance travel and card spend compliance through real-time data, ultimately reducing costs and errors across the board, and will provide issuers with a robust expense management solution to help customers get more from their corporate card programs.

Research shows that organizations can effectively increase worker and approver productivity through electronic expense reporting, card data population and work-flow software. By minimizing manual entry, eliminating duplicate entry, and automating a portion of approvals, participants in a recent MasterCard study successfully achieved back-office time savings averaging 61% and cost savings averaging 68%. The ability to streamline processes and better manage spend is a key reason for the growth in adoption of expense management solutions, particularly as companies look for ways to reign in overall travel and entertainment expenditure.

"Given the difficult economic environment, companies of all sizes are looking for easy and cost-effective ways to reduce costs now," said Steve Abrams, Group Executive, Global Commercial Products, MasterCard Worldwide. "By offering an easy-to-implement, feature-rich travel and expense management solution that adapts to business requirements, integrates with existing systems and can be delivered via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), issuers can provide their corporate customers with a solution that will make an immediate impact to their bottom line. The combined features of this offering enable corporate customers to gain greater spend visibility, increase employee efficiency, and monitor compliance with travel policies."

CyberShift Expense is an end-to-end solution that allows for management of all business travel and expense reporting. Unlike other expense management solutions on the market, CyberShift Expense integrates seamlessly with other business processes and, when combined with MasterCard's enhanced card data, and detailed travel insights including itinerary and hotel folio detail, provides a superior offering for corporate customers. While the agreement with MasterCard is targeted at the middle market, financial institutions are also able to integrate the solution for large and multinational organizations.

"In defining a comprehensive spend management solution for the middle market segment, MasterCard was a logical choice as a partner given its ability to move quickly to respond to marketplace demand for an open, competitive solution," said Robert E. Farina, CEO, CyberShift, Inc. "MasterCard is a trusted brand with excellent distribution. It offers corporate card data that is far superior and much deeper than other card companies and a travel analytical tool that provides actionable data to help travel managers identify areas for cost reduction. Together, with CyberShift's best-in-class solutions, we'll be able to offer MasterCard issuers a compelling solution for their corporate card customers at an extremely competitive price point. Our comprehensive spend management capabilities and SaaS delivery will allow corporate card customers to control spend and rapidly achieve significant ROI. "