BBVA Streamlines Expense Management For Card Purchases

Spanish financial firm BBVA has created a Global Commercial Cards product that lets firms have more control over the utilization of business cards by staffers.

The new offering is designed to assist business customers in streamlining and optimizing costs paid through the bank’s commercial cards, according to a Monday (Nov. 23) announcement.

Global Commercial Cards tailors to the requirements of firms of all different sizes and speeds to optimize the workflow of everyone who participates in the expense management procedure, according to the announcement.

The offering is in charge of centralizing all costs and directing them to the expense management technology or enterprise resource planning system (ERP) that the firm chooses without intervention.

Global Commercial Cards is integrated with expense management technologies like Captio by Emburse, SAP Concur, Certify by Emburse, Expensify, and Visa IntelliLink Spend Management.

“With Global Commercial Cards, BBVA has managed to bridge the gap between two worlds: commercial cards and expense management tools. To achieve it, it has used technology and data enabling companies to manage their employees’ expenses in a much more agile and simple way, while keeping control and end to end traceability throughout the whole process,” said Sergio Ortega, head of global commercial cards solution at BBVA Enterprise Clients.

Companies can use the offering for commercial cards issued in Portugal, Spain, Mexico, Turkey, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay and Peru.

In separate news, BBVA took part in a pilot payment effort to link the SWIFT gpi with the U.K.’s nationwide instant payment technology, and the results were displayed at the Sibos conference.

The BBVA participated in the pilot along with five financial institutions in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

The goal was to test the linkage of the SWIFT gpi with The Faster Payments Scheme (FPS).

Separately, BBVA said it would sell its U.S. arm, called BBVA USA Bancshares, to PNC Financial Services Group in an all-cash deal for $11.6 billion.