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TravelBank-powered Commercial Rewards Card offers a seamless digital experience for middle market companies

With the cost of business travel soaring, many companies are looking for ways to simplify the time, effort and dollars they spend on getting their employees from here to there and back.

“This summer, crowds and cost are not the only challenges facing companies seeking every competitive advantage in order to grow,” said Duke Chung, co-founder and CEO of TravelBank, an award-winning fintech company acquired in 2021 by U.S. Bancorp.

“We know that inflation, staffing shortages and uncertain flights affect not only the traveling employee, but also their managers and often their finance department,” Chung said. “And when that happens, the amount of time and effort to align expense tracking and reporting can be overwhelming – even in the best-equipped companies. It simply takes a lot of work and effort to keep track of it all.”

One way to address the challenge, Chung said, is to update legacy tools, systems and solutions, especially for businesses that rely on manual processes and outdated tools for expense control. But that can be impractical and unscalable for many mid-size companies.

With this unique challenge in mind, U.S. Bank and TravelBank worked together to build the Commercial Rewards Card, a new, innovative solution to help emerging middle market companies control and monitor business expenses in real-time while simultaneously consolidating the time-consuming, manual processes involved in business expense management.

“Emerging middle market businesses have similar needs and opportunities as their larger competitors, but the traditional corporate card and expense solutions weren’t designed for them,” said Dan Skaggs, head of middle market bankcard product at U.S. Bank. “That’s why we created a solution tailored for their unique needs that is easy to implement and includes features that larger firms benefit from today.”

Introduced in June, the Commercial Rewards solution integrates controls and workflows  into one card, expense and travel management platform designed especially for mid-size companies, helping them replace formerly time-consuming manual processes with a single, integrated tool for business expense, travel and card management, Skaggs said. 

Among the card’s benefits, he said, are:

• Access to real-time data that gives companies greater control, improves productivity, offers visibility into business spending and makes it fast and easy for employees to keep track of their expenses via a suite of integrated products.
• Enhanced employee spend control and visibility that helps reduce and eliminate paper-based manual processes so there’s no more tracking and reconciling expenses across multiple systems. Also, insights on spending can help companies and employees adhere to policy.

Jointly designed by U.S. Bank and TravelBank, the Commercial Rewards Card leverages TravelBank’s intuitive, user-friendly digital interface to provide a seamless card, travel and expense management solution for business travelers – from road warriors to infrequent travelers – and for finance organization program administrators, he said.

“It’s really an all-in-one design,” Chung said. “With Commercial Rewards, companies can better manage cashflow, gain real-time insights into employee business expenses, and integrate easily with other, pre-existing HR and/or ERP business systems.”