Card Spending Oversight Minus the Hassle

Keeping fraud, policy misuse and waste in check when it comes to corporate card programs can be quite the grueling and costly task. In fact, on average, companies attribute 3-5 percent of their annual spend to fraud, waste, and misuse, says Manish Singh, Vice President of Corporate Development at Oversight Systems. In a recent interview, Singh and Katie Harrison, Associate Product Director at TSYS, revealed the ways in which Oversight’s automated solution aims to keep all corporate card transactions transparent, accountable and growing – without the high costs and time-consuming implementation.

Earlier in the year, TSYS announced an agreement with Oversight Systems that brought to market a solution that helps corporate purchasing professionals detect and eliminate fraud, policy misuse and waste within their card programs. Do you have an idea of how much money organizations lose due to these issues?

MS: The findings can vary from client to client, largely based on the configuration parameters that reflect their policies. Some clients are more aggressive than others with their guidelines. In Oversight’s experience, for an average client, the costs related to fraud, misuse and waste range from 3 to 5 percent of annual spend.

Does this relationship allow TSYS and Oversight to leverage their technology for greater service and functionality to end-users, and can you provide examples?

KH: Absolutely. Through the creation of the TSYS-Oversight connector, we can now enable the transfer of data directly to Oversight. Corporate end-users can quickly begin using the Oversight Insights On Demand – Powered by TSYS solution to help reduce fraud and identify employee misuse or abuse, while also growing their card programs through transparency and control of employee spending. The TSYS-Oversight Connector also provides the opportunity for TSYS commercial issuers to enable this service for their corporate customers directly on the TSYS system. This helps cut lengthy implementations and time-consuming data-mapping activities that the corporate customers may have had to undertake before. Through our partnership, TSYS and Oversight have made possible a seamless integration of our technology ─ and we’re excited about the value this brings to corporate financial customers.

Can you provide us with examples of how this solution can facilitate the work of a typical corporate card program manager or auditor? How easy is it to implement?

MS: If you think about the current state of analyzing card-related expenses in organizations, it tends to be largely sample-based and manual in nature. Program managers and auditors in these organizations are typically viewing about 20 percent of their transactions on a manual basis, they’re identifying whether these transactions comply with policies on an individual transaction basis, and they’re often supplementing receipt validation as part of the review process.

Oversight automates the transaction analysis process for these stakeholders by analyzing 100 percent of the transactions against predefined, best practices-based analytics ─ that we call “insights” ─ to identify the highest-risk exceptions to policy and the behaviors of patterns associated with misuse. Once we identify these issues, we provide an action-oriented workflow that then allows these program managers to take action on these findings in a manner that not only enforces their policies, but also influences the action of their employees going forward.

What you also find with Oversight Insights On Demand is that what we identify in potential findings tends to be far less than what these organizations are viewing on a manual sample basis. We’ll look at 100 percent of the transactions, and on average identify less than 5 percent of those transactions that are attributable to fraud, waste and misuse. There’s efficiency from a utilization standpoint, while at the same time an increase in the scope of their audit, and a reduction in the cost of compliance.

KH: We have now created a flag on the TSYS system that allows TSYS commercial issuers to indicate that their corporate customers are now subscribing to the Oversight Insights On Demand solution. That enables transfer of all of the data Oversight needs for the corporate transactions to be sent the next day. This eliminates a lot of time for customers in implementing and setting up all of the data required.

MS: That’s absolutely right. It’s drastically reduced the time to value for clients. From an Oversight perspective, clients determine the combination of insights or analytics that they want to run the data against. They also have the opportunity to determine the frequency with which they want to perform this analysis, and they can provide us with configuration parameters to tailor the analysis to their practices and policies. And we can have a client up and running in less than a week after signing them up.

Oversight has been providing its online auditing solution to corporate and government agencies since 2003. Why did you choose to partner with TSYS for delivery of your solution to the issuing clients? 

MS: It’s pretty much a no-brainer for us. We’re all about taking friction out of the process for our clients, and TSYS presented us with the perfect opportunity to take down a key barrier that’s related to data acquisition and delivering a service to corporates. In the past, while corporates were involved in providing us their own data, it would often take them a significant amount of time to get that data to us. Through the TSYS-Oversight Connector, we’ve been able to get that data through just turning on a switch.

TSYS also has a dominant market share when it comes to corporate cards through its network of clients, and by leveraging this connector, we now have a medium for a consistent data feed.

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