The challenge

At QuEST, the treasury team based in India takes care of corporate credit card administration for the entire organisation across the globe. From looking after employee spend requirements and building great relationships with banking partners, to managing liquidity while enabling quick resolution of business-related expenses, corporate credit cards play a vital role in the company.

QuEST’s corporate credit cards are consolidated with a few issuers and it is the treasury team’s responsibility to maintain the best corporate relationships with bankers. The main challenge was to make its corporate credit card programme more effective and more efficient for the business.

The solution

The company’s strategy is to leverage the global footprint with a centralised programme, run out of Bangalore, India. The centralised mechanism receives all queries from across the globe through its helpdesk, whilst QuEST’s banking partners provide a global banking platform which talks to its enterprise resource planning (ERP). The business spend is distributed back to each employee locally for the purpose of validating and filing expense claims on Oracle iExpense.

The banking partners include American Express (in India, USA, Singapore and Japan) and ING cards in Europe. QuEST also uses HSBC and Citi as back-up cards for higher band employees. These banking partners were chosen because they have global programmes which can be customised at an individual level.

Each employee is treated individually, and special care is taken to provide the best service. Credit card policies were set up by country and employee band. These policies are modified yearly and programmed into Oracle iExpense. Card holders are also familiarised with the spending and reporting rules established by the company policy.

The transactions of the credit cards directly flow into the company’s Oracle iExpense database, which eradicates the risk of fraud, whilst reducing the time involved in the process. File feed implementation also brings all expenses directly into the database, stored so that in future if an audit is required for any specific employee for any specific month it is justified to be correct, since the file is system-generated.

Furthermore, QuEST’s helpdesk service has drastically improved in all areas, especially with respect to confidentiality. All employees holding a corporate credit card are highly satisfied with the quality of service as measured by the Annual Department Satisfaction scores. The response delivered for their queries are also within the timeline as measured through Helpdesk KPIs.

Best practice and innovation

QuEST has empowered its globally-dispersed workforce and has enabled international expansion, and faster integration of acquisitions. Its credit card policy, based on the needs of its diverse business and the needs of its employees has boosted morale. Employees feel empowered and valued by the business.

The automated process has also mitigated the risk of fraud by minimising any human intervention in the process. In addition, through good negotiations and banking relationships, QuEST is able to earn incentives from credit card agreements with banks.

Key benefits

• Built strong bonds with banking counterparts to develop and further facilitate the corporate credit card programme.
• Recently entered into an agreement for QuEST Global Services NA Inc. which will help earn more than 100bps as spend increases above US$3m for the next three years.
• In India, the agreement results in a rebate of 0.25% and more if spend increases more than INR10m.
• The corporate credit card programme is now more robust and user friendly and well-managed in terms of governance.
• Employee demand for a card increased, awarded Best Departmental Satisfaction in the entire finance function of QuEST Global.