Commercial Payment Cards Can Help Companies Worldwide Satisfy Financial Compliance Requirements

New white paper offers travel & entertainment and procure-to-pay best practices to achieve financial accountability

ACTE Global Conference, Munich, Germany, 23 October 2007

Visa has released a new white paper, titled, "Commercial Cards and Financial Compliance," to help organizations meet financial accountability requirements in many countries around the world. The paper identifies best practices in electronic payment programs for the travel and entertainment (T&E) management process and Procure-to-Pay function deployed by companies worldwide to help satisfy compliance requirements and achieve more control and visibility over spending. Commercial card programs leverage technology to build efficient controls, monitor adherence and provide the data necessary to mitigate control-related risk.

The paper, co-published with ACTE Global, the association of corporate travel executives, and released today at the annual Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) Global Education Conference in Munich, Germany, focuses on corporate card and purchasing card (P-card) program strategies, which are an integral part of best practices because they help companies meet control and audit requirements. Corporate cards are used primarily for T&E expenses, while P-cards are primarily used by companies for expenses related to maintenance, repair, operations, and office supplies.

"Commercial cards are an integral part of best practice control strategies as they leverage technology to help with compliance and build efficient controls at each stage of the Procure-to-Pay process. These programs are key in helping minimize spend out-of-policy and employee misuse, by providing visibility into spend," said Janet Zablock, vice president, Visa Commercial, Visa Inc. "The power of corporate and purchasing cards to bolster control over spending and help comply with regulations is compelling."

T&E Best Practices

Leading companies also ensure that T&E policies are aligned with overall procure-to-pay objectives and are actively endorsed by senior management. Best practices that contribute to enhanced control for the travel management function include:

Centralized travel management: Centralizing improves the ability to track and analyze travel spend.

Company-wide travel policies: Developing and distributing travel restrictions, mandates, and policy updates means that employees are aware of and understand policies, and are more likely to follow them.

Coordinated event planning through travel management function: Coordinating improves the ability to track events planning and other unique travel spend as a subset of overall firm travel spend and increases ratio of spend through preferred vendors.

Implementing a T&E card program: Card programs facilitate a degree of control through card features and through back-end audit and exception reporting.

Procure-to-Pay Best Practices

Similar to travel managers, purchasing managers seek to create a more transparent and accountable purchasing system. Visa has identified best practices employed by companies worldwide to optimize the entire Procure-to-Pay process, including sourcing, order placement, payment and settlement, reconciliation, control and audit and reporting.

Financial Regulations

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is designed to help ensure financial transparency in publicly traded companies in the U.S. SOX has impacted companies worldwide that have enacted policies to implement end-to-end process controls and the periodic monitoring of organizational compliance. Once SOX became law in the U.S., many other countries around the world implemented laws that enforced or recommended adherence to strict corporate governance principles. While these laws vary in degree of stringency as compared to SOX, they have two common core themes - the enforcement or recommendation to implement organizational controls and the periodic monitoring of organizational compliance.

To view the entire Compliance white paper, including a comprehensive overview of T&E and Procure-to-Pay Best Practices and a description for how corporate and purchasing cards can help ease financial compliance, visit www.visa.com/compliance.

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Notes to Editors:

About ACTE Global: The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) is a not-for-profit association established to provide executive-level global education and peer-to-peer networking opportunities. Membership spans all of business travel, from corporate buyers to agencies to suppliers, and accords all sectors equal membership. ACTE serves more than 5,000 executives in 49 countries. For more information, visit www.acte.org.

About Visa Commercial: Visa Commercial payment solutions -- Visa Business, Visa Corporate and Visa Purchasing -- combine payment with information to create intelligent payment solutions that are designed to enable business and government organizations of any size and type to reduce costs, streamline operational and payment processes, and make more informed business decisions. Backed by Visa's unsurpassed acceptance, Visa Commercial products and services are designed to provide a complete way to manage payment-related processes, including travel and entertainment and procurement expenditures, payroll distribution, and information management. For more information, visit www.visa.com/visacommercial.

About Visa: Visa operates the world's largest retail electronic payments network providing processing services and payment product platforms. This includes consumer credit, debit, prepaid and commercial payments, which are offered under the Visa, Visa Electron, Interlink and PLUS brands. Visa enjoys unsurpassed acceptance around the world and Visa/PLUS is one of the world's largest global ATM networks, offering cash access in local currency in more than 170 countries. For more information, visit www.corporate.visa.com.

Contact: Sabine Middlemass, Visa Inc., Tel: +1 650 432 8307 at globalmedia@visa.com, or Carolyn Krytzer, Burson-Marsteller, Tel: +1 415 591 4022 at carolyn.krytzer@bm.com

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