The Great Debate UK
from Business Traveller:
The corporate card game
You work for a boutique-sized firm. For want of a better term, you’re in middle-management. You don’t have a corporate credit card but are on the road quite a bit. Sometimes you’re away for over a fortnight and need to shell out a couple of thousand pounds for flights and hotel rooms and rental cars and expensive dinners. That all goes on your personal credit card.
You have access to a whizzy online expense tool, but repayments are not instant. Your credit card direct-debits your current account and your overdraft function can’t take that kind of hit. Your credit card company hits you for interest.
You wonder whether it would be ok to put in an expense claim for the ensuing interest. Your company’s Financial Director isn’t very sympathetic – but then he has a corporate card. Senior management have discussed whether the firm is now of a size to warrant handing out corporate credit cards. They decided against the idea; they know how people are sometimes tempted to abuse their expenses.
Enter the prepaid card. John Sharman, CEO of Tuxedo Money Solutions, a firm which provides prepaid cards for travellers, says for the very reasons stated above they’re experiencing more traction with firms who employ business travellers. Apart from the fact that no one likes spending their own money when on company time, there’s also security concerns when on the move in some of the more... obscure parts of the world.
from The Great Debate:
Credit cards unkindest cut for U.S. consumers
-- James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --
Government intervention or not, banks will be cutting up America's credit cards at an unprecedented rate, with grave implications for the economy and company profits.
The U.S. Federal Reserve last week added more nutrition to its alphabet soup of rescue programs when it unveiled the Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), under which, among other things, it will lend up to $200 billion to investors in securities backed by credit-card, auto and student loans.
