HSBC Business Insights: Professional Services Firm Case Study

The company is a multinational professional services network with consultants traveling to client sites on a regular basis.

Each consultant held on to individual personal cards and were reimbursed on project expenses by providing paper receipts to their human resources department.

Amid COVID-19, the company recognised that the institution of a corporate card programme would help to automate consultant expense processes without system investment or integration. They were particularly looking at Mastercard due to the extensive amount of merchants that accepted payments via this method.

The manual submission of receipts and personal credit card statements for each claim resulted in difficulties in reconciliation. The company were also mindful of the risks stemming from their employees being liable for their own cards.

They also lack the control to restrict the threshold amount of spend based on merchants and industry, which was not compliant with internal company policy. In terms of setting card level limits, it is the company’s policy to block certain industry and merchant codes.

Reconciling and feeding data back into their customised SAP also proved to be laborious and time consuming as manual entry is involved.

HSBC’s Corporate Card programme allows the company to assign an individual credit card to each project for consultants to use when making payments. This allows the company’s staff to differentiate between projects by referring to the unique card number assigned to each project. This facilitated greater ease of identifying and reconciling receipts with card payments, enabling quicker turnaround time on reimbursements.

Through MiVision, HSBC’s proprietary card management portal, reports and information can be generated for the company’s specific needs. Programme administrators are able to monitor cardholder spending 24/7 and gain timely insights to ensure programme compliance and monitor success metrics. In line with the company’s expense policy, the programme provided added security by restricting transactions at specific merchants and merchant category codes.

The programme also gives the company the capability to cash withdrawal at the cardholder levels, which greatly addressed the company’s challenges and helped to better monitor expenses.

The company’s projects are now differentiated by a unique card number, making payment reconciliation faster and easier.

With the added reporting visibility provided by MiVision and the digitised expense process, the company’s resources were freed up from manual operations and reallocated to a more effective monitoring of employee spending.

MiVision allows the company to put in place controls that are in accordance with the company’s internal policy, greatly achieving the company’s goals.

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