BMO Spend & Payment Solutions: 3 Business Travel Survival Strategies to Encourage Travel Policy Compliance and Control the # 2 Largest Controllable Expense

NBTA CANADA 6th ANNUAL CONFERENCE & EXHIBITOR SHOWCASE - TORONTO, April 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - As business travelers take to the skies, BMO Spend & Payment Solutions (http://www.bmospendandpayment.com/index.html), a division of BMO Financial Group (NYSE, TSX: BMO), offers corporate travel managers three strategies to effectively control travel & entertainment (T&E) costs, typically the second largest controllable corporate expense following wages and salaries:

1) Add a corporate card rewards program to give employees incentive for adoption

Encourage employees to use your company's corporate card by adding a program that allows them to redeem awards for personal use. The best rewards programs allow employees to redeem for travel rewards and a wide range of merchandise and services whenever they choose - with no risk of expiration.

In turn, consolidated financial information and enhanced travel data gives your company better negotiating leverage with new vendors, savings analysis of potential travel policy changes, and a longer hold on cash with extended payment due dates.

2) Use data at the individual transaction level to measure compliance, refine policy and watch incremental savings add up

More granular transaction information helps you better understand who is spending how much on what and where. This gives you the ability to:

    -   monitor out-of-compliance purchases and take corrective actions
    -   quantify policy effectiveness and tally spend by category
    -   effectively negotiate with vendors
    -   pinpoint opportunities to generate savings through policy changes

    3) Communicating policy: Make it user-friendly, accessible & actionable

The best corporate travel programs utilize the real-time functionality of available on-line booking tools, travel dashboards and expense reporting systems to quickly communicate policies and out-of-compliance transactions.

What you see you can control

Terry Wellesley, Executive Managing Director Corporate Payment Sales North America, BMO Spend & Payment Solutions, commented, "The concept is simple: What you can see, you can control. But the T&E category - where policies have been notoriously difficult to enforce - demands more creativity and innovation to encourage spend policy compliance. Compliance generates better spend visibility which makes it far easier to negotiate better rates, improve road-friendly policies and remove significant costs from the bottom line."

About BMO Spend & Payment Solutions

In 2009, BMO Financial Group solidified its position as one of the leading issuers of T&E solutions with the acquisition of the North American franchise of Diners Club International and forming key strategic partnerships with Cybershift and TravelMaster.

Today, as the 5th largest corporate card issuer in North America and backed by MasterCard's widespread acceptance, BMO Financial Group offers one of the most complete commercial card portfolios - with strong dedicated programs for travel, purchasing (p-card) and fleet. It is best positioned to meet the surging demand for a "one-card" program; from 2006 to 2009, BMO saw its number of requests for proposal (RFPs) for one-card programs spike from 16 percent to 50 percent.

BMO Spend & Payment Solutions partners with customers to ensure the success of their card programs, with a holistic approach to manage the end-to-end process of sourcing to payment.

SOURCE BMO Bank of Montreal