Visa announced the launch of a meetings card and an alliance with meetings technology provider Arcaneo.

The card now is available in the United States and Canada, based on issuer availability, with further expansion in the future.

Companies wishing to use the Visa Meetings card do not have to be Visa clients.

"We felt that timing was right," said Louis Goodson, senior business leader for Visa Commercial Solutions. "Each company's approach to managing meetings is diverse. There's no single answer."

He added that the meetings card would combine offerings from Visa's existing corporate and purchasing cards.

Specific offerings of the meetings card will vary based on a company's needs, and can include authorization control and limited-use capabilities. Cards are issued to individual buyers or for individual meetings.

"In companies that we've talked to, those tend to be the types of variables that they want," said Goodson. "They don't want to be shoehorned into a specific model."

The meetings card capabilities also can be incorporated into a one-card program for smaller companies, Goodson said.

Visa soon will launch the product in its Central Europe, Middle East and Africa region, Goodson said. It will launch the card in European Union countries in the third quarter of this year, with Asia/Pacific following in 2009.

The card also launched with Visa's multinational program, composed of top issuers that serve approximately 50 key markets in which multinational companies operate.

The alliance with Arcaneo allows Visa or card issuers to transmit transaction data into Arcaneo's Metron meetings management solution, allowing customers to view actual spend against a particular meeting's budget. The data feed is sent to the user daily.

"We knew that there would be a need for companies that wanted to have not only reporting for meetings after the fact, but really wanted to have an end-to-end solution," Goodson said. "Their solution provides not only the back-end reconciliation reporting capabilities, but also allows for meeting planners to plan at a detailed level up front."

Once charges are uploaded into Metron, they can either be automatically applied to a meeting's budget or a buyer can go in and manually apply charges to lines of spend, said Dale Beckles, president and CEO of Arcaneo

"A number of our clients are looking for solutions to help them manage the spend surrounding meetings in a more effective manner," Beckles said.

Visa's Goodson added, "They can see the meetings before they've happened, any expense that's been incurred prior to the meeting, and really see the full lifecycle of a single meeting or meetings across an entire enterprise."

Corbin Ball, president of Bellingham, Wash.-based meetings technology consulting firm Corbin Ball Associates, said agreements between meetings management technology providers and corporate card companies allow companies to further streamline the meetings process.