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Sumitomo Mitsui Card, MasterCard and Fraedom to provide real-time expense management system for corporate cards

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Sumitomo Mitsui Card Co Ltd, Fraedom Japan Inc and MasterCard announced Tuesday their agreement to collaborate in developing and launching Japan’s first real-time expense management system, called Corporate Card Control, for managing corporate credit-card usage.

With the system, data on employee usage of corporate cards issued by Sumitomo Mitsui Card will be linked to a cloud-based expense management system provided by Fraedom. Corporate managers can use the system to place limits on card usage in real time and set up usage alerts and other notifications on MasterCard’s In Control platform for spending management. The service is expected to be launched by the end of this fiscal year and the initial customer target is 1,000 companies within the first five years.

Although some companies are already using expense management systems, such systems often require manual entry of expense data, which can be labor intensive and time consuming. It can also lead to errant data entry or expense data manipulation in some cases, thus requiring accounting personnel to check the data very thoroughly. In Europe and the United States, many companies have solved such problems by integrating their employee expenses through the use of corporate cards linked to an expense management system. In Japan, however, corporate cards have yet to be popularized.

The new Corporate Card Control expense management system enables companies to improve operational efficiency and enhance corporate governance. Further, for companies that have delayed their adoption of corporate cards due to concerns about inappropriate usage by employees or abuse by third persons, the new system now offers them a secure means of thoroughly managing and controlling their corporate cards.

Currently, less than 30% of all Japanese companies have adopted some form of expense management system. The market size for such products is estimated to be as large as two billion yen. The electronic storage of receipts was approved by the Cabinet in January this year, following an amendment to the Act on Special Provisions concerning Preservation Methods for Books and Documents Related to National Tax Prepared by Means of Computers. Expense management, a corporate function that Japanese companies have been slow to systemize, is now attracting fresh attention as expense management systems gain wider acceptance.

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