Mastercard: HR & Finance’s collaboration is central to modernizing expenses

As the business world is becoming increasingly digital, the HR sector is continually looking for new ways to harness technology.

For Mastercard’s Tulsi Narayan, one key focus is how expenses can be better streamlined.

As the business’s European Payments Lead, Narayan is passionate about modernizing how money moves through supply chains, while helping businesses and organizations optimize working capital, enhance security, and unlock efficiency and scale.

Mastercard is therefore driving this transformation with innovative, trusted solutions to make the commercial payments experience seamless – spanning everything from commercial cards, B2B accounts payables, and receivables, to non-carded bill payments, remittances, and disbursements.

In an exclusive conversation with Narayan, UNLEASH explores more about how HR and finance can collaborate to strengthen payment procedures.

HR’s role in digital payments

For HR leaders, the shift from manual to digital payments is becoming increasingly important to enhance the employee experience.

Narayan and her team have therefore been working on modernizing workplace expenses – which consists of moving beyond manual, paper-heavy processes and embracing digital solutions that make life easier for both employees and employers.

“When expense management is quick, seamless and flexible it supports employee wellbeing and eases administrative burden,” Narayan explains.

What’s more, research by Mastercard found that 88% of travel decision-makers believe optimizing travel processes requires greater cross-functional collaboration, spanning departments such as HR, finance, and legal.

“This means that increasingly, organizations are realizing that expense management is not only a finance function, but an integral part of their people strategy,” she adds.

Similarly, Narayan tells UNLEASH that HR leaders play a vital role in understanding the needs and challenges employees face around this issue.

She explains: “HR is uniquely positioned to advocate for solutions that enhance employee welfare and day-to-day work experiences, and integrated expense management platforms and flexible payment tools like virtual cards can do just that.”

HR is uniquely positioned to advocate solutions that “enhance employee welfare and day-to-day work experiences”, while integrating expense management platforms and flexible payment tools like virtual cards.

Although some businesses have decided to merge HR and IT teams, Narayan explains that collaborating closely with finance and procurement teams can also bring a number of benefits.

She says: “Procurement and payments may traditionally be seen as back-office functions, but they are central to how organizations operate and support their people.

“We are seeing growing momentum among HR and finance leaders to work together as an integrated team to reimagine these functions as true strategic assets.”

By modernizing expense and payment systems, organizations aim to offer employees faster reimbursements, simpler processes, and better support whilst on the move.

Narayan expands that this not only improves satisfaction, it also signals that the company values employee time and their overall workplace experience.

What’s more, by integrating the two teams, HR will offer a wide variety of benefits to employees, too.

“HR leaders can ensure their corporate travel and expense (T&E) policies and expense management decisions support employee wellbeing, allowing employees to focus on their core work instead of administrative tasks.

“Virtual cards are also making it much easier for HR, in collaboration with their finance teams, to manage a wide range of employee-related T&E payments.

They offer a secure, easy way to cover spending during the recruitment process, as well as for wellbeing initiatives, benefits, travel incidentals, or one-off purchases, for example home office equipment or moving expenses for employees who are relocating.”

Infrequent travelers, temporary staff, or contractors who may not have access to traditional, physical corporate cards can particularly benefit from these virtual cards, as they remove the burden of relying on personal funds and having to expense these back later.

Mastercard is therefore working to bring mobile virtual card payments to their business customers. This solution enables organizations to generate virtual cards for use online or to an employee’s mobile wallet, giving them the ability to pay with just a click or a tap and pay for what they need without delay.

Streamlining expenses with AI

Across the industry, the power of AI is being harnessed to make every day commerce experiences more secure, smart and personal.

Narayan gives the example that SAP Concur built AI into its Concur Expense solution to streamline expense reporting.

Now, when uploading a receipt, the SAP Concur mobile app opens a new tab, and AI models extract the payment amount, date, tax, and other relevant information and fill out the expense report automatically.

“The platform also leverages embedded AI technology to assess compliance, sending immediate feedback if a questionable expense arises, helping prevent employees from incurring costs that may not be reimbursed,” Narayan adds.

“Within our payment operations, we leverage AI to boost fraud detection, improve transaction security, and deliver more streamlined, frictionless payment experiences.

“In 2024, AI enabled around one in three of our products within value-added services and solutions.”

Although many companies are working to modernize their payment flows, some leaders are hesitant about embracing the change.

In fact, Narayan expresses that many organizations tend to believe that upgrading their existing processes will be disruptive or too complex.

However, in today’s modern, digital solutions are typically designed to integrate smoothly with existing tools, making the transition far easier than expected.

Narayan expands: “Businesses ultimately stand to benefit from modernizing and digitizing existing processes, which is a direct way to drive value across the organization.

“Employees frequently spend considerable time and energy navigating manual workflows and outdated systems, and managing an increasingly hybrid workforce adds further complexities, with 86% of travel decision makers agreeing that increasingly hybrid and remote work environments have made managing travel and expenses more challenging.

Modernizing finance operations is therefore not only about boosting efficiencies within procurement and finance, but has wider benefits in supporting the wider organization, providing employees with increased convenience, flexibility, and ease across their business spending,” concludes Narayan.