VISA International provides transaction processing systems, brand support and development. It does not issue cards, but supports a number of card issuers worldwide, of which there are 48 business card issuers in Europe. Card issuers provide cards and account facilities to both private and commercial customers. Cardholders are either private customers or corporate accounts. The assignment undertaken by AVSI relates to their Business Card strategy in the corporate travel market.

Corporate card customers require additional information on travel-related transactions to improve their visibility of travel expenditure by profit centre. This information may be collected when the reservation is made, either directly with the airline or more likely through a travel agent. Currently, some of this information is not always passed on to the organisation and hence is not available to the corporate customer.

AVSI's role has been in scoping the technical and commercial issues in the transfer of information between third parties internationally and then to negotiate bilateral (or multi-lateral) agreements with:

• Information providers and intermediary organisations to supply additional information in an appropriate format
• Card issuers to forward this information to them for onward transmission to their corporate customers.