ORLANDO, Fla. -- Citicorp Diners Club entered a marketing alliance
to promote its corporate card products with Captura Software's
expense management software.
Citicorp also announced an alliance with Value Integrated
Network [VIN.net], a Barrington, Ill.-based maker of software that
compares travel expenditures against industry averages.
The Citicorp Diners Club- Captura alliance will help them
compete against American Express and Concur Technologies, which
unveiled an integrated self-booking and expense management tool
here at the National Business Travel Association convention.
Brenda Gaines, executive vice president of Citicorp Diners Club
said the deals will strengthen the card issuer's position in the
marketplace. Citicorp Diners Club is one of the nation's leading
corporate card companies, with sales volume of $32 billion in 1997
and about 8 million card members.
Captura, based in Bothell, Wash., markets a program called
Employee Payables that helps companies automate the process of
filing expenses, thus taking time and costs out of the process.
Elizabeth Andreini, international market manager at Captura,
said the software firm has an existing relationship with
Paymentech, a Dallas-based issuer of Visa and MasterCards, but she
said the Diners Club deal will give Captura more reach into the
corporate card market. "If [Diners Club] recognizes a client who
needs this type of solution, then they will introduce us to that
client," Andreini said.
The Diners Club alliance will allow companies using the card to
get weekly or daily data feeds into the Employee Payables program,
making manual entry of expense data unnecessary.
Despite the deal with Diners Club, Captura still lacks an
alliance that can match up directly against the American Express
Concur deal.
Under the American Express Concur Technologies deal, booking
data from AXI -- the American Express-Microsoft self-booking
program -- is fed automatically into the expense management
software.
Captura has an alliance with software developer, Internet Travel
Network, but data feeds between the firms are not automated.