Visa and SAP Announce Plans to Drive Down the Costs of Corporate Financial Management

By utilizing SAP NetWeaver and Visas enhanced data services, Visa and SAP will enable corporations and their employees to manage payments for business expenditures, automatically integrate related transaction data into enterprise systems and increase the speed and lower the cost of expense administration. These clients are expected to realize improved operational effectiveness, greater financial control and reduced integration costs of payment data into their core financial management systems. The companies have initiated efforts to integrate SAP NetWeaver and the Visa Commercial Format (VCF), a standard data set containing enhanced spending data from all Visa Commercial payment products, to provide unprecedented levels of data delivery to corporations that use Visa with SAPs enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The transparent delivery and open technology of SAP NetWeaver will give shared clients better utilization of spending data without significant integration investments resulting in process improvements and lower operational costs on a variety of business processes. T&E administration is considered to be the second-highest corporate expense behind payroll and benefits. With the integration of SAP NetWeaver and Visa Commercial data from banks, airlines, hotels and other merchants, the data will flow directly to the clients ERP systems. SAP NetWeaver will enable continued secure automated delivery and integration of Visa -- provided data to clients back-office systems and expense reporting software helping them to monitor volume and compliance, identify trends and patterns and view detailed spend data and analytics. Employees will be more productive by automatically receiving expense data, thus reducing data entry and processing times. Companies will gain better tracking and understanding of corporate spending, an improved supplier negotiation position, better policy controls -- as well as stricter accountability of financial tracking and auditing functions.