American Express is known for providing credit card solutions for both individuals and companies for decades across the world, especially its ability to bring value to card holders through its innovative approaches. Financial Express correspondent Heena Khandelwal approached Saru Kaushal, Country Business Head, Global Corporate Payments, and asked her about what really is on offer and how it benefits customers. Here are the excerpts:
Q. American Express has developed a range of expense management solutions. Can you elaborate?
American Express offers a range of expense management solutions through several corporate cards to cater to the needs of both large and mid-sized companies for their diverse requirements. The American Express Corporate Cards are available in Green, Gold and Platinum. Each of these cards is designed to offer convenience and card member benefits across several key needs that employees have when they travel for business.
For companies and specifically for CFOs and Procurement heads, the Corporate Cards deliver many key advantages such as visibility, control and savings on expenses being made by employees, online reporting and program management, seamless integration with existing systems, dedicated account management coupled with world-class customer service and consulting services. The program also offers extended payment terms and provides liability & limit options.
With American Express Corporate Meeting Card, Cardmembers can track, analyse and improve their meeting and event spends. And, American Express Purchasing Solutions is designed to help streamline the day to day business expenses like telecommunications, office durables etc, helping companies to save money and improve purchasing procedures with greater compliance and fraud protection.
Our Jet Airways American Express Corporate Card is a first-of-its-kind card in India. Employees earn a welcome bonus of 10,000 JPMiles, 3 JPMiles for every Rs 100 spent on T&E and 6 JPMiles for every Rs 100 spent and a 5% Discount on jetairways.com for air travel bookings.
Q. How conducive is India’s economic environment for travel and entertainment (T&E) growth?
Today, India is rated as one of the best investment destinations globally and has huge representation of global business brands and large Indian companies. As a developing economy, businesses in India are rapidly and systematically adopting global best standards and practices in every functional area, ensuring greater traction and implementation of these practices.
Q. How does American Express solutions benefit companies in the long run?
Large corporates look at bringing in process efficiencies and controls in their current business environment. They want to control costs across their national and global operations, particularly during challenging economic times. From our corporate card program to our meetings management solutions, to our superior data and reporting – our products and services help them in saving time and money; improve compliance; negotiate better deals with suppliers.
Q. What innovations you are bringing in your value proposition?
Since we cater to a diverse set of customers – it presents us with exciting opportunities to innovate differentiated products/solutions. We offer a first-in-market corporate membership rewards (MR) program that enables mid-market companies achieve greater savings and benefits. It allows companies to consolidate reward points earned through multiple cards issued to employees into a single company account. Corporate MR points can also be redeemed for cash-back or for a variety of relevant Corporate rewards that directly benefit business. And that’s not all – the Corporate MR points do not expire!
Q. How different is it from its competitors?
Our expertise lies in turning data into valuable information for our corporate customers, who can use it to make key decisions about how to manage their expenses and strengthen their businesses. It has today led more and more companies approach American Express to seek advice, solutions and technology that help them control their expenses and save money.
We bring both product and service differentiation to our Cardmembers in the expense management space. We do not offer just ‘Corporate Cards’ but we are also strategic business advisors to our clients in driving their bottom line. In fact, we begin the program with evaluating their existing travel policy.
We have a competitive advantage as we have a closed loop network – we bring together corporate, cardmembers and merchants and that data is incredibly valuable. We know where they spend online and offline. Unlike other players we have the largest integrated global payments platform. We strive to deliver benefits and services when our Cardmembers want it, where, and how they want it.
