Upbeat about customer spending power despite the current slowdown, private sector lender HDFC Bank has tied up with SAP Concur Solutions and Mastercard to roll out a new corporate credit card.

“The new credit card will provide a one-stop solution for payment and expense management during business trips and will enable seamless integration of all business-related spend into SAP Concur offerings, enhancing employee experience, increasing visibility, saving money, and improving corporate efficiency,” HDFC Bank said in a statement.

Parag Rao, Country Head, Payments Business and Marketing, HDFC Bank, said the lender is targeting about 5,000 companies to take the corporate credit card programme over the next three years.

While SAP India has about 12,000 corporate clients, HDFC Bank works with nearly 35,000 companies and it will be taking the programme to all of them, Rao told BusinessLine .

Spending on travel

He was also upbeat about corporate spending on travel and said there has been no slowdown as such. “We have seen business travel going up. The larger the corporate, the larger is their spend on travel. It is about eight per cent to 10 per cent of the company’s operational expenditure,” he noted.

At present, HDFC Bank has about 3,00,000 issuances or users of corporate credit cards. The commercial cards business amounts to about 20 per cent of the total spends.

Travel and entertainment is among the fastest growing spends in the commercial cards space, HDFC Bank statement said.

According to a recent SAP Concur survey conducted amongst 500 Indian business travellers, 31 per cent respondents were stressed about filing expense reports after a business trip in the middle of a busy workday. The survey also revealed that due to the existing gap in business travel expense management solutions, about 32 per cent of employees lost over ₹7,000 of their personal money on a travel related business expense that was not reimbursed.

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