American Express Cards has taken a major step towards Electronic Bill Presentation and Payment (EBPP) with the launch of an electronic statement service, offering corporate clients the option of receiving statements via a secure e-mail process.
Says Pamela White, Senior Manager, American Express Corporate Cards: "We have launched the service initially to a segment of our corporate card base, and will be rolling it out to the balance of our corporate card-members over the next few months."
The E-mail Corporation, SA's specialist in secure electronic document delivery, implemented the solution at American Express Cards.
Michael Wright, CEO of The E-mail Corporation, reveals that the American Express Cards project was one of the most efficient implementations done by Emailco to date. "The project team began focusing on the project in February, and the first live statements were delivered in May. That is a 12-week delivery time, on what was a complex and challenging project."
According to Wright, the complexity of the project lay in the multiple data input streams that included AFP, Text and XML. Says Wright: "The challenge was to work with all these data streams to produce a holistic solution. The final process is automated from the mainframe right through to the delivered e-mail."
The response from customers has been positive. Says White: "Speed of statement delivery as well as delivery direct to the card-members' mailbox has made this new service extremely popular with our corporate card-members. Demand is growing daily and we believe we will exceed our target of converting 60% of our client base onto the electronic format."
A further challenge in the corporate card arena was the consolidation of corporate statements. Says White: "American Express Cards wants to provide customers with functionality that improves the efficiency of their expense management processes. This includes consolidation of statements where appropriate, and additional statement formats such as spreadsheets and flat file data, to enhance the financial reconciliation process."
The E-mail Corporation's FinMail application was chosen for its ease of use and full feature offering. It enables organisations to take accounting or legacy data and create individual documents that can be delivered by e-mail. The FinMail suite incorporates a high-level security module and a powerful SMTP server that provides the delivery capability and comprehensive reporting.
Says White: "We partnered with The E-mail Corporation as they had a proven solution and were able to provide the extra development to cater for the challenges specific to the American Express Cards environment."
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