Business Travel News caught up with Ed Glassman, MasterCard Worldwide Global Commercial Products Group Executive, to ask questions about the future of the commercial card business. The interview highlights some of his thoughts on growth opportunities in the business, including continuing globalization and the evolution in the transactional technology, and corporate needs for transaction control and monitoring.
With respect to globalization, Glassman agreed that business worldwide presents huge opportunities, but believed in the near-term, the United States offers very particular attractions. The American B2B payments market continues to rely on checks to an extent not seen elsewhere in the world:
“We are awash in checks, and checks are terrible instruments for commercial payments. They’re slow, don’t carry data with them and don’t make it easy for either the buyer or the seller to do what they really want to do, which is to really have a tight activation of a commercial transaction, a payment transaction and a rich linkage between the two.”
Glassman also described MasterCard’s commitment to the commercial card market, with respect to ancillary services and products (authentication and data delivery, for example), that add value for commercial customers. He anticipates a long and steady growth cycle for the use of commercial cards in increasingly varied formats.
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