Cardholders and commercial card program administrators will see added convenience, efficiency and control from a new feature released by GE's Corporate Payment Services unit. The new manual authorization feature in NetService leverages GE's patented pre authorization technology and will significantly reduce phone calls that cardholders and PAs make when dealing with transaction declines at the point of sale.
Most of the time, there are good reasons for credit card declines at the point of sale: The cardholder's limit is exceeded, or the merchant category code is blocked. On the other hand, there's often a valid business reason why a particular transaction should be authorized. Until now, the PA would have to request a manual authorization by calling the Corporate Payment Services support center. Support staff would provide an override code the merchant would input by calling a toll-free number. Merchant employees often found this process time consuming and confusing. The innovative NetService functionality builds on GE's patented pre-authorization technology to provide the PA with the power and control to override declines in real-time. With the click of a mouse by the PA, the merchant obtains authorization by simply rerunning the charge. There is no need for a PA to call for an override request. Nor does the merchant have to call to input an authorization code. 'In the long run, we expect this new feature to cut the number of phone calls our customers make to deal with merchant declines by close to two-thirds,' NetService product manager Kristen King-Ward said. The online tool only overrides dollar and merchant code limits for the transaction at hand and does not affect the card's normal spending profile. The process also includes a control feature that ensures the charge is not authorized for a higher dollar amount. Hurricane Katrina provided tough conditions to test the new corporate credit card technology. Several PAs indicated that their cardholders were being declined and that merchants in the disaster areas refused to go through the typical phone-intensive override process. The capacity of regional phone systems was stretched too thin and time was of the essence. 'CPS was in the final stages of rolling out this new technology when Katrina struck. Responding to customer needs, we decided to implement key aspects of it early. Business cardholders in the disaster area were then able to make purchases with no additional phone calls required from merchants,' said King-Ward. NetService is a web self-service tool available to Corporate Payment Services cardholders and PAs 24 hours a day to view past statements, current transactions, make payments online and more. |
