The trend toward increasing worker productivity and controlling costs by way of software-as-a-service, or “SaaS (News - Alert)” solutions, is gaining momentum.

 

MasterCard Worldwide and CyberShift, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise expense management and workforce management software, today announced an alliance to provide businesses with CyberShift’s Expense Management Automation solution.

 

According to company officials, the agreement provides MasterCard issuers with a “compelling” travel and expense management solution that they can offer to their corporate card customers.

 

Through the combined capabilities of CyberShift and MasterCard, corporate card customers will have access to a flexible expense management solution, open integration to travel booking systems of choice, superior travel and spend analytics, BlackBerry (News - Alert) smartphone support, digital receipts filing, hotel folio data and much more, all delivered via a software-as-a-service model.

 

“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, in a statement. “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, 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.”

 

The solution, MasterCard company officials said, 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 percent and cost savings averaging 68 percent. 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.

 

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, company officials said. 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.

According to the latest Infonetics Research report, 82 percent of respondents planned to enhance, not replace, their existing security deployments with a software-as-a-service, or “SaaS” solution.

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