Corporate Purchasing Card: 2010 Results
- Though this corporate purchasing card has been issued in France for the past fifteen years, it has yet to be widely used. It is issued by Caisses d’Epargne, Crédit Mutuel-CIC, Société Générale, BNP Paribas and Banques Populaires. American Express, which issues its own corporate purchasing card, stepped out of the private sphere to focus on large companies.
- First dedicated to exchanges between private companies, purchasing cards have also been used by State services, local administrations and public institutions since the publication of the 2004 decree.
- In 2010, the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques and APECA (Association of European purchasing card professional – Association des Professionnels Européens de la Carte d’Achat) set up a promotional and informative campaign called “Tour de France de la Carte d’Achat et de la Dématérialisation 2010”. Three additional towns should be added in 2011: Dijon, Lille and Montpellier.
- This card is designed to make the supplying and billing processes more fluid, they can be automated and dematerialised.
- The purchasing cards are becoming more prevalent in the public sector with over 250 active programmes at the end of 2009 for about 69 million euros and 150,000 cards.
- Following a request for proposals, in January 2009, BNP Paribas was placed in charge of the interdepartmental market of the purchasing card and had to then provide cards as well as consulting and assistance services when they were being set up.