Conferma: The virtual world of Conferma

It seems that every day a new technology appears on the horizon with new functions and capabilities. The ever excited media is all too keen to report that this new technology is going to revolutionise the way we live.

Since the birth of the internet business has recognised its potential to create new markets and generate money. But, many early attempts at creating online businesses were restricted as the internet and its associated technologies were simply to slow – regardless of the potential. This led to the dot-com bubble as investors invested in projects that the technology couldn’t deliver.

Perhaps the most notable example of this was Boo.com an online fashion retailer in the early-mid nineties. They stretched the technology too far and their resultant collapse was symptomatic of the dot-com bubble - plenty of potential but not enough technology. However, as the internet developed and its capability improved the world became ever more reliant on this new virtual world.

Yet the emergence of one new piece of payment technology has gone largely unnoticed, virtual credit cards. Virtual credit cards operate in the same way as a normal card with the exception that no physical card is produced; they are issued dynamically for single purchasing events and are inherently secure.

In the virtual world the virtual card is coming to the fore. Enabling transactions and helping to realise the potential that so many saw in those early dot-com start-ups. They are easier to use and manage whilst offering increased flexibility and peace of mind. Essentially, virtual cards unlock revenue and create the flows of money many predicted.

Conferma has worked hard to build a network of financial partners capable of delivering virtual cards into the purchasing of corporate travel and expense (T&E). This growing network is; creating new efficiencies in existing purchasing processes, winning new business and creating new markets. Furthermore, Conferma’s settlement and reconciliation technology is superseding the traditional T&E billback process.

Conferma call this solution CSP (Conferma Settlement Platform) and it is rapidly gaining recognition within the world of corporate T&E.

Conferma and others within the payments industry have long recognised the potential of virtual cards. Conferma are using this technology to create new web-pay solutions that extend beyond corporate T&E into other B2B related purchasing categories. Anywhere, where there are; high-volume, mid-value transactions Conferma’s virtual cards can be deployed. Using Conferma’s technology does much more than traditional paper-based purchasing processes. It allows for data to be captured, processed and transmitted in a way that was not previously possible.

Ultimately, Conferma’s virtual credit card technology will give freedom of choice and transaction security in the virtual world.

Conferma: The I.T. Jungle

Recent high profile cyber attacks and security breaches for companies such as Sony have again brought the issue of PCI compliance into sharp focus. The attack on Sony proves that even the most I.T. savvy company can fall victim to a cyber attack.

For many industry commentators, Sony merely represents a growing list of companies who are victims of the I.T. jungle. Criminal gangs, terrorist organisations and hackers stalk companies looking for the slightest gap in security, a blind-spot, an open door or simple negligence. To then hack and steal personal and credit card data from unwary and ill-prepared companies.

When we consider the business travel industry we can see that the risks are high, how many TMCs photocopy and fax card data around the world to hotels, exhibition centres and alike? Relying on the honesty of their staff and the person receiving the fax for security! Or even worse store card data within their own systems.

Many TMCs and HBAs within the industry struggle to get to grips with PCI compliance and its implications. How much will it cost to implement? What do I need to do? Where do we begin? Achieving conformance is not simple and takes time to get right and maintain. So for small, medium and even large companies meeting the required standards can be problematic and expensive.

Basically, PCI standards have twelve points of compliance categorised into six groups. This sounds simple enough but there are roughly two hundred and fifty controls to be put in place, depending on the level of security you require. And the level of protection required is determined by the number of credit card transactions processed each year. Each of the two hundred and fifty controls can be verified in up to four times and may require up to four pieces of evidence to prove you meet PCI standards.

The costs of PCI accreditation for even a small TMC or HBA can run into thousands of pounds and for a large multi-national corporation it can be hundreds of thousands of pounds. However, doing nothing is not an option as MasterCard and Visa will fine breached companies for non-compliance. These fines reflect the scale and number of breaches and the size of the company. This ensures that conforming is the cheaper option.

In 2009 MasterCard* published their fines for non-compliance and these are steep. Fines can reach two hundred thousand dollars (US) for failing to meet the required standards with a charge of between ninety and three hundred dollars** per credit card record stolen. This doesn’t include the resultant legal action from your customers and damage to your company’s reputation. Put simply, for many companies within the industry, this is an issue of comply or die.

So with the costs of complying and the time it takes clearly overshadowed by the expense of a security breach where do you go for help. The answer is Conferma.

Conferma reduce the scope of your compliance requirements by taking the need to hold, process and transmit card data out of your company but not your control. In the modern I.T. jungle Conferma is the game keeper providing expertise and protection whilst saving both time and money.

*MasterCard
** Basics for PCI compliance

Conferma: Innovation in the world of corporate T&E

Within the Corporate T&E world there is an opinion, amongst some, that the industry lags behind other sectors in adopting and embracing new technologies and solutions. This could be, in part, due to the ageing and inflexible legacy systems that pervade amongst many operators that constrict their organisation.

Additionally, there are other challenges of finding and keeping staff capable of deploying and managing cutting-edge technology and the rising associated costs. Finally, where and how do you find an innovative and reliable technology partner? These are a few of the common problems that make IT such a difficult issue to address.

Put simply, the industry has a love hate relationship with IT. Yes we need it to do the complex data handling and moving but no we don’t want the ageing legacy systems and incompatible platforms.

Fundamentally, there is no silver bullet, no all encompassing ubiquitous system passing data between and from all Hotels, Airlines, Conference Halls, Rail, Car Hire and Taxi companies back to the booking agent and corporate. Similarly, the banks and technology partners all deploy their own solutions designed from their viewpoint.

So it is no wonder that any company investing in the next generation technology would take a good hard look at the market place before investing. After all, two years from now you don’t want to be tied to another legacy system incapable of meeting the challenges of the future.

One alternative is the Conferma Network! One partner pre-connected to numerous financial and technical partners via a single platform. Conferma’s agnostic approach to partnering with financial and technical partners allows our customers to seamlessly integrate our booking, and settlement platforms into their solutions.

Conferma’s unique and intelligent solutions provide both commercial and technical innovation in that all parties can benefit from using our intelligent solutions to supersede the traditional billback process whilst having the freedom to choose or stay with their existing technical and financial partners. Customers of the Conferma network have access to a powerful Hotel Booking system connected to 150,000 hotels and an array of technical and financial partners for the corporate T&E market.

The real value of the Conferma network is that it will change, grow and develop over the coming years’ in line with the industry. As new booking technologies appear, Conferma will embrace them; and as new partners appear, Conferma will join with them. I think you get the idea. We change, we adapt, we do the hard work - and you benefit.

We are listening to our customers

Last month Conferma completed the first of many Customer Surveys. The first segment of our customer base we listened to were frontline staff in the corporate hotel booking world. This short survey asked these corporate hotel bookers to rate our customer service and the booking website.

Once the results had been collated our technical team sat down to discuss the data and identify any opportunities to improve the service and solutions we offer. It was surprising that such a brief survey could generate so much information and ideas.

We were pleased with the results regarding customer service satisfaction – many respondents were either ‘Very Satisfied’ or ‘Satisfied’ with the service they received. 83.1% of respondents were either ‘Satisfied’ or ‘Very Satisfied’ with the availability of our customer support. The general feeling is that our customer support is performing well. However, we have spotted opportunities to do better.

To enhance our service further we are introducing bi-annual full-service reviews at an agency level. A new management feature will be built into the site to allow clients to nominate and manage their own contact list. Additionally, all customers will be informed of our support escalation process.

These are just a few of the customer support enhancements we hope will give our customers the support they deserve.

Conferma has achieved 100% availability during the last six months and we believe this justifies our investment in the latest hardware and software. In June last summer we launched v4 of our hotel booking solution, this .NET version is faster and more reliable than its predecessor v3.

When asked how responsive they thought our booking site was nearly half of all respondents thought it was ‘Responsive’ and 96.8% rated the site as either ‘Very Responsive, ‘Responsive’, or ‘OK’. Many within the technical team believe that Conferma can better this score and will work hard over the coming months to make the booking website more responsive.

One pleasing conclusion was that many of the improvements suggested for the website are already in our development pipeline.

Upcoming developments for the site include enhancing the search function, removing guide rates, improving data quality and enhancing administrator functionality. We are also considering introducing GDS property locator codes to help experienced staff quickly search the system.

We have more improvements in the development pipeline and will issue these to our customers over the coming months.

The Jevons Effect!

At Conferma we are always eulogising about the efficiencies and benefits our systems deliver to the corporate T&E industry. Improve your operations, use superior processes, reduce costs, reduce man hours, eliminate paper based processes and overcome the nightmare that is billback! These are just some of the benefits we tell the industry and anyone else who will listen to us.

What are the implications of these benefits you ask? Will we need fewer staff, can we process more customers, win new business? The answer is simple, about two hundred years ago a leading economist named William Jevons observed that increasing the efficiency with which a resource is used increases the rate of consumption.

In other words as your staff (human resources) adopt Conferma’s solutions they will suddenly be able to achieve more today than they could yesterday. Ultimately, the capacity of your team will increase as workflows are improved.

So where is this all going? The answer is simple, despite all our eulogies, many within the industry are still struggling to make efficiencies in the workplace, especially when it comes to hotel billback. Time after time I read numerous articles and blogs full of people wishing for an alternative to billback. Haven’t they heard? Didn’t they listen? Conferma overcame the problem of billback years ago. Probably about the same time, William Jevons was writing his notes up...

Taking billback as an example, this process is notoriously time-consuming as bookings and invoices have to be matched manually. In many cases, data is incomplete, delayed in arrival and can expose clients to a credit risk. Put simply the challenge is to match invoices with back office data.

Conferma have designed a solution that overcomes this problem using virtual card technology to gather and match booking and billing data and then pass this reconciled data to the correct parties involved.

This gathering and matching of data means frontline staff do not have to print off numerous documents or repeatedly enter the same data to make a booking. It is all done for them by Conferma powered technology. Additionally the automated reconciliation of data removes the tedious process of chasing up outstanding invoices.

Now you have learnt a little bit more, why not contact Conferma to see what we can do for you.

Data, data, everywhere, but not a report to run...

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.

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.