Mastercard Gives Commercial Cardholders More Insight Into Amazon Business Purchases

Mastercard has moved to give commercial cardholders greater insight into their expenses by providing more transaction data on Amazon Business purchases.
Mastercard argues that, for many businesses, reconciling B2B transactions can be challenging due to lack of robust reporting tools. Goods and services are sourced and shipped from a large number of suppliers, leaving business customers with a tremendous volume of expenses to process and often little information for each transaction.

The new offering promises to help change this, giving mid and large-size businesses a more intuitive and transparent way to understand and manage their expenses.

It provides a detailed understanding of each line-item, such as item description, price and relevant tax information, for all Amazon Business purchases, to help businesses better track expenses, expedite financial reconciliation and streamline the filing and auditing of expense reports.

Initially, the product is being made available in Germany, the UK and US for Mastercard commercial cards issued by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Citi, JP Morgan, Lloyds Bank, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland.

"More detailed transaction data helps make doing business easier," says Jeff Feuerstein, SVP, commercial products, Mastercard. "Our collaboration with Amazon Business streamlines financial reporting and cuts down on time spent reconciling transactions against statements. It gives our customers a clearer understanding of money spent."

Companies that enrol Mastercard commercial cards through bank partners are able to:

• View the details, quantities, unit price and tax for individual items they purchase
• See the shipping amounts associated with the financial charge
• Directly update information either in their expense management system or in the Smart Data platform

Mastercard has enhanced Smart Data, its market-leading, expense reporting and analytics suite, to leverage this enriched data to provide new reports and custom reporting tools. This capability is available to enrol commercial card programs from participating financial institutions. Mastercard Smart Data is used by nearly 250 issuers globally.

April 16, 2019