Seems to me that everyone's missing the point..... The value of a PCard is two-fold: * it enables the Buyer to establish controls over who buys what for how much from whom (and reducing maverick spend is a key benefit of eprocurement for both buyer and supplier) * it ensures the Supplier receives guaranteed payment (less PCard fee) within 2 - 4 days of purchase, compared with 60 - 120 days in mainstream circumstances.
With eprocurement systems capable of being configured with a virtual Pcard number according to user setup configuration (and I agree that there needs to be tight security around this), limits are placed on misuse / maverick spend. What are the alternatives? For the Supplier, not much. Other solutions that I've seen retain control of the payment decision with the Buyer - and that means payment in 60 - 120 days, regardless of the 'terms of payment' agreement between buyer and supplier. Applications can be configured to effect electronic funds transfer from Buyer to Supplier account on pre-agreed triggers, but guess what? buyers don't want to lose payment control, and the issue of who holds account data, etc. arises. ... or have I missed the point? Geoff -----Original Message----- From: Anders Rundgren [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, 2 October 2001 12:33 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: The end of P-Cards? >having any online, ubiquitously connected system with easy rule update and >change is an interesting challenge no matter who or how it is deployed >(especially with strict security and audit control for what is permitted >and/or changed, aka the whole objective of the system in the first place, >problem is also that traditionally, 90percent of fraud has been insider >fraud) And having an *external*, off-line, rule-based, hard-to-update-solution like P-cards is the short-cut to always having more or less incorrect data. >some of the larger corporations are starting to even have further >deployment of p-cards with the infrastructure providing statement->edi >translation that flows everything directly into the backend accounts >payable system. auto-industry with possibly 60,000 suppliers is one that >comes to mind. The world is obvously full of losers :-) Using systems like OBI (Open Buying on the Internet), P-Cards become completely redundant. For physical requisitions they have maybe 5 years more to live. On the Internet I wonder if they are used in any major extent today. <snip> >Not only does not having seemless end-to-end transaction authentication in >conjunction with transaction authorization an invitation for fraud ... but >also making it really simple and easy for insiders to access the system and >make rule changes is also an invitation to fraud. Typically, if you aren't >worried about insiders and fraud/skimming/etc ... then you probably aren't >good candidate for p-card rules in any case; just direct transaction >presentment to backend automated accounts payable may be sufficient (x9.59 >at POS and network supporting seemless, end-to-end strong transaction >authentication). 3D Secure et al how do you characterize that? Not end-to-end? I think that the definition of "end" will change after introduction of such systems. The universities' "Shibboleth" federated authentication system is a similar trend. Anders
