Expense Management Firm Emburse and Mastercard Streamline Reconciliations

Travel and expense (T&E) management firm Emburse has joined forces with Mastercard to offer enhanced security, proactive spend control and transaction data for its Emburse Cards.

This partnership aims to assist modern finance teams in adapting to the digital economy by providing secure, simple and accessible purchase transactions while automating traditionally manual reconciliation processes, the companies said in a Thursday (Dec. 7) press release.

“With Emburse Cards, we aim to deliver greater security with less effort, while shortening the time between expenses being incurred, reconciled and reimbursed,” Eric Friedrichsen, CEO at Emburse, said in the release. “Mastercard’s leading global payment technology and security makes them the perfect network partner to help us deliver the best possible solution to our customers.”

With Emburse Cards, finance professionals can issue and manage both virtual and physical corporate cards from a centralized platform, according to the release.

This solution streamlines the approval and reimbursement process, reducing the time employees have to wait for expenses to be approved and reimbursed, the release said. Additionally, it offers pre-approvals for employee budgets and automated reconciliation, providing leaders with a comprehensive view of their team’s spend.

The collaboration with Mastercard brings added security and reach to Emburse customers for both physical and virtual cards, per the release. Cardholders will benefit from MasterCoverage and Mastercard ID Theft Protection, safeguarding against fraud and identity theft. Moreover, Mastercard’s HealthLock benefit provides an end-to-end analytics-driven platform to protect cardholders’ medical identities and data.

The integration of Emburse and Mastercard technology enables more extensive use of data and insights, relieving finance departments from the burden of manually entering and interpreting key information, according to the release. Transaction details, such as hotel and airline information, will be automatically populated into expense reports submitted via Emburse’s expense management products.

This provides finance and procurement teams with granular analysis of travel spend, facilitating better rate negotiations with vendors and increased policy compliance, the release said.

“As travel and expense management grows increasingly complex, it’s become imperative to provide a streamlined and digitized process for expense management,” Marie Elizabeth Aloisi, executive vice president, U.S. Commercial Solutions and Acceptance, Mastercard Healthcare Solutions, said in the release.

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that the share of consumers receiving business expense reimbursements has risen by 57% in the last two years. At the time of the survey, 5.5% of consumers had received business expense reimbursements in the last 12 months, up from 3.5% in 2021, according to “Generation Instant: Business Expense Reimbursements,” a PYMNTS and Ingo Money collaboration.