In a world where organisations seek end to end travel and expense solutions, often using multiple suppliers the missing link is usually the detailed payment information. In response, Visa and MasterCard introduced a solution, which allows merchants to submit additional data to the card issuers regarding a specific transaction (P Card). This additional data may include; tax amounts, product codes, descriptions, shipping information, etc - this is called; Level 3 data. The banks display this information on customer's statements. This provides an enhanced level of service from both merchants and banks enabling the end customer to account for their purchases automatically, potentially right through to the corporate ERP system.
So why do you still only receive basic statements (transaction date, merchant narrative and the charge amount), you ask? Well it seems whilst transaction fees from the banks/issuers are lower to merchants if Level 3 data is provided. The implementation process is both expensive and complex for small-mid size merchants and even larger ones don't hand off this data for "strategic" reasons.
Historically airlines do provide Level 3 data; the lower transaction fee is very enticing due to their volume. The data made available by airlines includes the traveller name, ticket number and route information. After looking at a number of examples of airline data we discovered some airlines are very consistent in the data they provide. However, some airlines provide a poorer level of data for instance Route information from some airlines were "XXX-XXX", rather than "MAN-JFK". This complicates the situation even more.
This lack of transaction level data received from their suppliers frustrates Business customers. To compound this Merchants tend to provide the data via email or post, which arrives in different formats and on a timescale that suits the merchant. Manual intervention is then required by the customer to reconcile all this non matched data to monthly bank statements.
An implementation barrier exists for banks and issuers which hinders the success of Level 3 data - the inability to push this as a solution. With the number of merchants' they deal with, where and how would they start? After all they are financial, not technology companies. Their core business is the transactions themselves - not optional data.
CSP puts business customers on the front foot, ensuring critical data is passes to Conferma at the point a virtual card is deployed. This gives our customers centralised, standard, well formatted, upfront data with visibility of incoming charges, proactive not reactive.
Together with our partners, we're bringing our customers a level of data and insight that is unprecedented in the industry.
Monday, 14 February 2011
Monday, 7 February 2011
Simplifying Travel Settlement
In travel, the majority of booking methods require a form of guarantee, primarily a credit card. This is how you're expected to book via the GDS, self booking tools, OTA’s or even over the telephone. When a card is available, it works pretty well; its quick, secure and all the backend processes work (for example, non-arrival or cancellation charges are billed back to the right travellers payment card). The suppliers like it, they don't have to chase an agent or traveller for payment as they refer back to the guarantee.
The problem comes for those travellers who aren't in possession of a corporate card. In a world where business is global and more employees, from all levels of business, have to travel - booking can be a pain. Where corporate cards are not available to the employee, an immediate barrier to travel is raised. Of course, the barrier can be overcome via varied clunky options. The traveller could chase down another colleague to use their corporate card (security alarm bells!), but what payment card is the checkout charge going to be settled with? Even agency level guarantee’s, such as IATA, doesn't solve non-corporate card holder travellers having to settle on departure. The traveller could choose to use their personal payment card and place a claim into accounts at a later date; not only is this problematic for the traveller, it also creates more work for your accounts department!
Without your own corporate card it is becoming more and more difficult to access efficient and simple business travel processes. By removing these barriers to travel your business could be better connected and more prosperous (your accounts department might also be happier?).
Billback powered by CSP embeds a unique virtual card into travel booking processes, enabling staff within a business to book travel and not have to worry about settlement. The card is never visible to the traveller or agent, increasing the security of the process. Card transactions are matched back to the original booking data which provides the greatest level of detail for reporting. The information is uploaded directly into the corporate or agency back office.
Last Friday we announced with we're partnering with Sabre to provide virtual payments directly into the GDS' flagship application, Sabre Red, empowering more travel agents to take-up CSP than ever before.
With both our travel agent, financial and technology partners we're enabling better business by simplifying travel settlement.
The problem comes for those travellers who aren't in possession of a corporate card. In a world where business is global and more employees, from all levels of business, have to travel - booking can be a pain. Where corporate cards are not available to the employee, an immediate barrier to travel is raised. Of course, the barrier can be overcome via varied clunky options. The traveller could chase down another colleague to use their corporate card (security alarm bells!), but what payment card is the checkout charge going to be settled with? Even agency level guarantee’s, such as IATA, doesn't solve non-corporate card holder travellers having to settle on departure. The traveller could choose to use their personal payment card and place a claim into accounts at a later date; not only is this problematic for the traveller, it also creates more work for your accounts department!
Without your own corporate card it is becoming more and more difficult to access efficient and simple business travel processes. By removing these barriers to travel your business could be better connected and more prosperous (your accounts department might also be happier?).
Billback powered by CSP embeds a unique virtual card into travel booking processes, enabling staff within a business to book travel and not have to worry about settlement. The card is never visible to the traveller or agent, increasing the security of the process. Card transactions are matched back to the original booking data which provides the greatest level of detail for reporting. The information is uploaded directly into the corporate or agency back office.
Last Friday we announced with we're partnering with Sabre to provide virtual payments directly into the GDS' flagship application, Sabre Red, empowering more travel agents to take-up CSP than ever before.
With both our travel agent, financial and technology partners we're enabling better business by simplifying travel settlement.
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Community Product Development
In a competitive industry such as business travel, are off the shelf tools best or build your own?
At Conferma we don't believe we have an "off the shelf" product, where we are the designers and everyone gets the same tool. We have a community developed product, Hotel Booker, which is flexible and used in so many different ways! Here is a quick overview of the Hotel Booker V4 development:-
The Conferma community consists of our technology partners, customers and their corporate clients. Hotel Booker is used every day by thousands of travel agents and corporate users, ensuring the new V4 (launched last July) was going to be accepted well had to be carefully considered by the team. We started our development in March 2010 with a number of meetings with the development and support teams to outline what we would change in the current V3 and the biggest frustrations our customers had with the current site. With a constructive list, the lead developer on Hotel Booker set off to design some rough outlines of how the site may look and function. Each week we would meet up and review the outline of the site, how our new amendments functionality was going to work, how clients were going to be selected, how best to work the hotel search from any page, what fields should be mandatory, etc... Lots of thought was given to the new site; for the first four weeks not a single line of code was written!
Once we felt we had a practical vision of the new site we consulted our agency customers to gain reaction. Overall the feedback was very positive! Customers liked the fresh new design, with some commenting (internally we knew this) - they thought we'd completely forgot about look and feel in V3! Our customers gave us some good points to consider and also requested functionality they wanted which we hadn't even thought of. In some cases customers gave comment on the same features but with slightly different feedback that the other hadn't thought of, it was then down to Conferma to take all the feedback and merge it into one solution as effectively as possible.
Over the coming months, we developed the design into a working site, checking back in with our customers to gain further reaction. The excitement we were generating was a little unbelievable; our customers really engaged with the products development and couldn't wait to use it in production.
After three months of development we moved the site into our live environment for beta testing with a few key agents. We released beta 2 a few weeks later after some key feedback, including further enhancements and fixes. It was encouraging to see our customers support us through this busy stage.
In late June we announced to the world V4 was now live and ready for action. Our customers began to flood to the new site - new corporate users loved it and agencies were beginning to win more business off the back of a strong customer facing booking tool and productivity gains. The development was a success thanks to the community!
So our customers have a great tool, but they are all competing with each and how can a corporate decide between which agencies to use? The fact is our customers may use the same platform but each one brings their own bespoke adaptation. Implementation strategies vary enormously with our customers; some are very self booker focused, some agency only, some use our Booking API and access our hotel content from other booking tools, the levels of integration depth with GDS and data hand-off all vary, some take advantage of CSP and some don't, some allow self bookers to amend and some don't... The agencies own business practice is taken into consideration; pricing, commercial relationships, other services such as VIP access and CSP reconciliation. The corporates have a lot to think of. The entrepreneurialism and creativity of our customers together with the flexibility of Hotel Booker gives our agencies the ability to remain unique. That’s what community based development is all about!!
Does community based product development work for Conferma? Absolutely, but more importantly, it works for our customers.
At Conferma we don't believe we have an "off the shelf" product, where we are the designers and everyone gets the same tool. We have a community developed product, Hotel Booker, which is flexible and used in so many different ways! Here is a quick overview of the Hotel Booker V4 development:-
The Conferma community consists of our technology partners, customers and their corporate clients. Hotel Booker is used every day by thousands of travel agents and corporate users, ensuring the new V4 (launched last July) was going to be accepted well had to be carefully considered by the team. We started our development in March 2010 with a number of meetings with the development and support teams to outline what we would change in the current V3 and the biggest frustrations our customers had with the current site. With a constructive list, the lead developer on Hotel Booker set off to design some rough outlines of how the site may look and function. Each week we would meet up and review the outline of the site, how our new amendments functionality was going to work, how clients were going to be selected, how best to work the hotel search from any page, what fields should be mandatory, etc... Lots of thought was given to the new site; for the first four weeks not a single line of code was written!
Once we felt we had a practical vision of the new site we consulted our agency customers to gain reaction. Overall the feedback was very positive! Customers liked the fresh new design, with some commenting (internally we knew this) - they thought we'd completely forgot about look and feel in V3! Our customers gave us some good points to consider and also requested functionality they wanted which we hadn't even thought of. In some cases customers gave comment on the same features but with slightly different feedback that the other hadn't thought of, it was then down to Conferma to take all the feedback and merge it into one solution as effectively as possible.
Over the coming months, we developed the design into a working site, checking back in with our customers to gain further reaction. The excitement we were generating was a little unbelievable; our customers really engaged with the products development and couldn't wait to use it in production.
After three months of development we moved the site into our live environment for beta testing with a few key agents. We released beta 2 a few weeks later after some key feedback, including further enhancements and fixes. It was encouraging to see our customers support us through this busy stage.
In late June we announced to the world V4 was now live and ready for action. Our customers began to flood to the new site - new corporate users loved it and agencies were beginning to win more business off the back of a strong customer facing booking tool and productivity gains. The development was a success thanks to the community!
So our customers have a great tool, but they are all competing with each and how can a corporate decide between which agencies to use? The fact is our customers may use the same platform but each one brings their own bespoke adaptation. Implementation strategies vary enormously with our customers; some are very self booker focused, some agency only, some use our Booking API and access our hotel content from other booking tools, the levels of integration depth with GDS and data hand-off all vary, some take advantage of CSP and some don't, some allow self bookers to amend and some don't... The agencies own business practice is taken into consideration; pricing, commercial relationships, other services such as VIP access and CSP reconciliation. The corporates have a lot to think of. The entrepreneurialism and creativity of our customers together with the flexibility of Hotel Booker gives our agencies the ability to remain unique. That’s what community based development is all about!!
Does community based product development work for Conferma? Absolutely, but more importantly, it works for our customers.
Friday, 7 January 2011
Happy New Year
Firstly, let me wish a Happy New Year to all our partners and customers! Together we achieved a lot in 2010 and this year is going to be no exception; the team is already working on some exciting projects! We're ramping up our innovation and accessibility to our technologies to bring you fresh, cutting edge travel and expense technology throughout 2011.
Last year we spent time rebuilding our platform, redeveloping our core customer facing applications and expanding our financial partners. Throughout 2011 we'll be engaging with our customers to build on last years updates to take bigger leaps forward in the industry.
In Q1 we'll be updating Hotel Booker V4 with some exciting new features, they're all under wraps at the moment but we can't wait to release them into the live environment and see them being used. 95% of our customers are now migrated onto Hotel Booker V4 and the feedback has been great. With it's ease of use, connectivity, CSP support, community based development, configuration and deep integration into agency back offices, Hotel Booker is becoming a market leading booking tool for hotel bookings. Updates soon!
Last year the CSP platform grew from strength to strength. CSP is being recognised as the industry standard for billback - immediate payment, auto-reconciliation, finance partner neutral and tight integration into any platform. A strong network of CSP enabled travel companies is emerging. Launched last year, CSP On-Demand is truly in demand! Over the coming months merchants will start to see more payments powered by CSP, integrated into our partner systems.
Along with our financial partners, the team will be available at this years Business Travel Show on Feb 8-9th, Earls Court London. We have some great announcements that we're looking forward to sharing with you. If you'd like to schedule some time to speak to the team, please contact enquiries@conferma.com.
We're looking forward to a great year.
Last year we spent time rebuilding our platform, redeveloping our core customer facing applications and expanding our financial partners. Throughout 2011 we'll be engaging with our customers to build on last years updates to take bigger leaps forward in the industry.
In Q1 we'll be updating Hotel Booker V4 with some exciting new features, they're all under wraps at the moment but we can't wait to release them into the live environment and see them being used. 95% of our customers are now migrated onto Hotel Booker V4 and the feedback has been great. With it's ease of use, connectivity, CSP support, community based development, configuration and deep integration into agency back offices, Hotel Booker is becoming a market leading booking tool for hotel bookings. Updates soon!
Last year the CSP platform grew from strength to strength. CSP is being recognised as the industry standard for billback - immediate payment, auto-reconciliation, finance partner neutral and tight integration into any platform. A strong network of CSP enabled travel companies is emerging. Launched last year, CSP On-Demand is truly in demand! Over the coming months merchants will start to see more payments powered by CSP, integrated into our partner systems.
Along with our financial partners, the team will be available at this years Business Travel Show on Feb 8-9th, Earls Court London. We have some great announcements that we're looking forward to sharing with you. If you'd like to schedule some time to speak to the team, please contact enquiries@conferma.com.
We're looking forward to a great year.
Friday, 1 October 2010
An industry reliant on faxing...
In a world of billions of web pages, natural use of email and tightly integrated web services - why is the fax still important for business in 2010?
The word fax derives from the Latin word "fac simile", meaning "make similar". The first patent for a fax was recorded in 1843 by Scottish inventory Alexander Bain who created a pendulum based back-and-forth line-by-line scanning mechanism. The first commercial fax machine, named the Pantelegraph, invented by Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli went into production in 1861. Fax machines were invented and in commercial use almost 15 years ahead of the invention of the telephone!
Whilst the fax machine has had a fair number of competitors over the years, it's still here and we see the number on the footers of our emails and the adverts in the paper. It's the easiest way to securely send a document quickly. Business' still don't trust the internet for the delivery of data; often we receive DVDs or memory sticks hand delivered with a small excel file due to the authors not trusting the delivery of sensitive data via email.
We all understand the fax is also sent over the telephone network and it's just a print out at the other end - so why fax over email? Emails can send encrypted files, but the end users may not have the relevant skills or software to decrypt the file. As a rule email is NOT secure. As the Met Police advise, you should never send any confidential information to anyone through email.. Moreover from a suppliers point of view accepting credit card numbers by email may be in breach of merchant agreements, and lead to penalties being imposed by banks.
Receiving a printed document still feels tangible - something you can touch - and important, just as you were to receive an invoice from a supplier, therefore it's still managed with care and attention.
Acceptance of faxes within hotels is a natural business requirement and an entire workflow runs from the messages received via faxes. Our Conferma Settlement Platform (CSP) utilises faxing technologies to communicate the payment details in a PCI DSS manner. It wouldn't be possible to communicate payment details/card data to hotels via any other standard delivery manner that is secure, accepted and with a prompt delivery time.
To remove the fax communication to the hotel entirely online booking systems and suppliers should adopt functionality to accept explicit payment details and payment restrictions. This is some years away from reality, until then the fax is here to stay.
The word fax derives from the Latin word "fac simile", meaning "make similar". The first patent for a fax was recorded in 1843 by Scottish inventory Alexander Bain who created a pendulum based back-and-forth line-by-line scanning mechanism. The first commercial fax machine, named the Pantelegraph, invented by Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli went into production in 1861. Fax machines were invented and in commercial use almost 15 years ahead of the invention of the telephone!
Whilst the fax machine has had a fair number of competitors over the years, it's still here and we see the number on the footers of our emails and the adverts in the paper. It's the easiest way to securely send a document quickly. Business' still don't trust the internet for the delivery of data; often we receive DVDs or memory sticks hand delivered with a small excel file due to the authors not trusting the delivery of sensitive data via email.
We all understand the fax is also sent over the telephone network and it's just a print out at the other end - so why fax over email? Emails can send encrypted files, but the end users may not have the relevant skills or software to decrypt the file. As a rule email is NOT secure. As the Met Police advise, you should never send any confidential information to anyone through email.. Moreover from a suppliers point of view accepting credit card numbers by email may be in breach of merchant agreements, and lead to penalties being imposed by banks.
Receiving a printed document still feels tangible - something you can touch - and important, just as you were to receive an invoice from a supplier, therefore it's still managed with care and attention.
Acceptance of faxes within hotels is a natural business requirement and an entire workflow runs from the messages received via faxes. Our Conferma Settlement Platform (CSP) utilises faxing technologies to communicate the payment details in a PCI DSS manner. It wouldn't be possible to communicate payment details/card data to hotels via any other standard delivery manner that is secure, accepted and with a prompt delivery time.
To remove the fax communication to the hotel entirely online booking systems and suppliers should adopt functionality to accept explicit payment details and payment restrictions. This is some years away from reality, until then the fax is here to stay.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
Enabling Mobile Payments
With the launch of the iPhone App Store came a revolution, a restart and repositioning of what mobile applications should be. WAP was dead and mobile optimised websites were simply not good enough. Along came the mobile application; responsive, online, location aware and functional. Chasing after Apple's App Store came the Nokia Ovi Store, Windows Mobile Marketplace and Googles Android Market - each with their varied success, but all with a fresh look at enabling mobile applications for the end user. From games to sports, education to entertainment, navigation to news, productivity to photography - the applications available are broad in their appeal.
The highest downloadable applications have to be games - simple, addictive and on-demand, which are free in many cases. Newer games on all platforms are also coming into line with established handheld gaming devices such as the Sony PSP or Nintendo DS.
With regards to business applications however, download volumes are small. The availability of good business applications, be it hotel booking or general procurement applications are few and far between. There are many applications that provide location based hotel search, where the look to book ratio must be exhaustive. Mobile booking just isn't trusted. There are a few reasons for this; the client is using his or her phone so may as well dial the agent for them to book, the applications are not that user friendly or simply due to a slow connection speed where disconnects are frequent. However, one key issue stands at the fore, payment. Users still do not trust entering their card details into a phone for security reasons... Not to mention the vision of Mr Jones, the salesman, sat in a car park at 8pm, payment card in one hand, phone in the other - manually typing the card details into a phone with a sensitive keyboard or keys that are too small for his fingers. Not a great user experience.
Other attacks at the mobile payments are from the likes of PayPal or Google Checkout with mobile wallets, these are cumbersome in their implementation involving text messages and PIN numbers for authorisation.
Mobile purchasing only works successfully where you already have a card stored with the owner of the application, for instance you've stored your card on your Amazon account via the Amazon website, or your card details are already stored with Apple via iTunes. Essentially the accepted payment method, in a mobile purchase, is one click purchasing.
Earlier this year we launched the CSP On-Demand API, giving third parties access to the award winning CSP Platform in their own applications. This is being successfully rolled out at the moment with great momentum. Clients are learning that by not only linking in the system to their self-booking tools and desktop applications, that the mobile space is a fantastic opportunity to successfully take on. End users never have to see or enter a credit card into any application.
With the CSP On-Demand API and our card partners we're enabling mobile one-click payments to grow in the corporate procurement marketplace.
If you have a mobile application and are interested in learning more, get in touch.
The highest downloadable applications have to be games - simple, addictive and on-demand, which are free in many cases. Newer games on all platforms are also coming into line with established handheld gaming devices such as the Sony PSP or Nintendo DS.
With regards to business applications however, download volumes are small. The availability of good business applications, be it hotel booking or general procurement applications are few and far between. There are many applications that provide location based hotel search, where the look to book ratio must be exhaustive. Mobile booking just isn't trusted. There are a few reasons for this; the client is using his or her phone so may as well dial the agent for them to book, the applications are not that user friendly or simply due to a slow connection speed where disconnects are frequent. However, one key issue stands at the fore, payment. Users still do not trust entering their card details into a phone for security reasons... Not to mention the vision of Mr Jones, the salesman, sat in a car park at 8pm, payment card in one hand, phone in the other - manually typing the card details into a phone with a sensitive keyboard or keys that are too small for his fingers. Not a great user experience.
Other attacks at the mobile payments are from the likes of PayPal or Google Checkout with mobile wallets, these are cumbersome in their implementation involving text messages and PIN numbers for authorisation.
Mobile purchasing only works successfully where you already have a card stored with the owner of the application, for instance you've stored your card on your Amazon account via the Amazon website, or your card details are already stored with Apple via iTunes. Essentially the accepted payment method, in a mobile purchase, is one click purchasing.
Earlier this year we launched the CSP On-Demand API, giving third parties access to the award winning CSP Platform in their own applications. This is being successfully rolled out at the moment with great momentum. Clients are learning that by not only linking in the system to their self-booking tools and desktop applications, that the mobile space is a fantastic opportunity to successfully take on. End users never have to see or enter a credit card into any application.
With the CSP On-Demand API and our card partners we're enabling mobile one-click payments to grow in the corporate procurement marketplace.
If you have a mobile application and are interested in learning more, get in touch.
Friday, 20 August 2010
Be brave upgrade!
As a software company we face the key question of 'how are we best going to provide our products to our user base?' At Conferma we want to ensure all our products are easily accessible to our clients and updates are made available instantly. To this end we chose to build web based solutions, opposed to desktop applications. This enables our clients to access all our latest releases through a web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Web Browsers essentially allow you to browse websites (pages/documents) on the internet which are delivered in a presentation language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). HTML was originally designed to combat the multiple formats universities were using to create documents, by using one format, HTML. The idea was anyone anywhere in the world could access them over the network. The project was started by Sir Tim Berners-Lee whilst he was working at CERN in 1989. Since then the Netcraft Web Server Survey (December 2009) estimates there are over 233.8 million websites exposing over 20.3 billion web pages.
The user experience of websites has exploded over the past few of years (remember that 2007/8 buzz word "web 2.0"?), they've become smarter, faster, more intuitive, desktop-like and all round more powerful. The browsers have enabled developers to do more by offering better support for presentation (CSS), faster JavaScript engines (client side scripts) with AJAX support and application level functionality such as tabbed browsing, plugin support and enhanced security features.
At Conferma we're committed to increasing efficiency in T&E processes by removing the unnecessary items and automating processes where possible and with the release of Hotel Booker V4 we've done just that. We've brought the number of pages down from 8 to 3, enabling bookings to be placed in less than a minute and enhanced the speed of both the profile and booking search - it's quick!
Efficiency savings can also be gained by upgrading your browser, for instance did you know Internet Explorer 6 is over three times slower than Internet Explorer 7 and that Internet Explorer 7 is twice as slow as Internet Explorer 8?
IE6 has served its purpose, but the fact is it's one of the worst performing browsers in terms of security and speed and is no longer supported by Microsoft. As a technology provider offering products over the web we find IE6 actually stifles our development potential by using developer resource to ensure our sites support it, rather than letting them innovate.
We fully encourage users look at the available browsers and upgrade, older browsers are wasting your time...
Web Browsers essentially allow you to browse websites (pages/documents) on the internet which are delivered in a presentation language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). HTML was originally designed to combat the multiple formats universities were using to create documents, by using one format, HTML. The idea was anyone anywhere in the world could access them over the network. The project was started by Sir Tim Berners-Lee whilst he was working at CERN in 1989. Since then the Netcraft Web Server Survey (December 2009) estimates there are over 233.8 million websites exposing over 20.3 billion web pages.
The user experience of websites has exploded over the past few of years (remember that 2007/8 buzz word "web 2.0"?), they've become smarter, faster, more intuitive, desktop-like and all round more powerful. The browsers have enabled developers to do more by offering better support for presentation (CSS), faster JavaScript engines (client side scripts) with AJAX support and application level functionality such as tabbed browsing, plugin support and enhanced security features.
At Conferma we're committed to increasing efficiency in T&E processes by removing the unnecessary items and automating processes where possible and with the release of Hotel Booker V4 we've done just that. We've brought the number of pages down from 8 to 3, enabling bookings to be placed in less than a minute and enhanced the speed of both the profile and booking search - it's quick!
Efficiency savings can also be gained by upgrading your browser, for instance did you know Internet Explorer 6 is over three times slower than Internet Explorer 7 and that Internet Explorer 7 is twice as slow as Internet Explorer 8?
IE6 has served its purpose, but the fact is it's one of the worst performing browsers in terms of security and speed and is no longer supported by Microsoft. As a technology provider offering products over the web we find IE6 actually stifles our development potential by using developer resource to ensure our sites support it, rather than letting them innovate.
We fully encourage users look at the available browsers and upgrade, older browsers are wasting your time...
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