When funding student-athlete and student-group travel, many universities and colleges still rely on cash to get the job done. Team managers often dole out dollars for per diems en route to games, leaving students in charge of complex paper trails. In some cases, universities may ask coaches to share a credit card or pass around prepaid cards.
While cash and shared credit cards provide a means to a necessary end—funding student travel—they also introduce a host of issues. First, students might lose their travel money, and there’s no way to track spending. Alternatively, if students spend less than their per diem, schools cannot benefit from the savings. Meanwhile, shared cards and prepaid cards become a hassle for a large group, while relying on coaches’ credit cards requires time-consuming expense reports and reimbursements.
Fortunately, virtual cards are revolutionizing travel expenses for schools of all sizes. They provide an easy way for institutions to deploy and track per diem funds while enabling a completely digital payment experience for anyone traveling on behalf of your institution.
Consider these five ways that virtual cards are shifting university-funded travel:
1. Rely less on cash; more on virtual systems. While dispersing cash may seem the easiest route, it's problematic. As noted, there's the obvious risk of losing the cash or having it stolen. This creates added expenses for the school and leaves students in a lurch on their trip. In addition, our increasingly cashless world presents challenges for students at some establishments. Shared credit cards and coaches’ credit cards provide a clunky alternative—one that makes tracking expenses at an individual level cumbersome. The pressing risks that come with cash or shared cards emphasize the need to move toward virtual spending systems.
2. Easier deployment and use. You can deploy virtual cards in bulk and students can activate them immediately. With leading virtual cards, a team manager or administrator can enter recipients' names into the virtual card system and push them out to the team members as needed. Then, students receive an email and download the virtual card application to their mobile wallet. Within minutes, they can use the card to buy lunch on the road or stock up on healthy snacks for their hotel room.
3. More control over student spending. Unlike cash per diems, virtual cards enable you to implement defined spending controls. You can designate categories for the types of purchases students can—and cannot—make. Moreover, you can also track student spending across teams, groups and the institution to uncover insights that yield cost savings or highlight additional student needs. The reporting elevates your travel expense program and allows you to fine-tune your spending to better serve traveling students and the institution.
4. Reduced fraud risk. With a virtual card, students receive a uniquely generated card number with an expiration date and security code. As mentioned, schools and coaches can limit the amounts spent and where students can make purchases. You can also determine how long the card remains active. For instance, you might push a card to a soccer team on the Friday before an away match and have it expire the evening the team returns home. The added controls make virtual cards more secure than their physical counterparts. By design, virtual cards are highly secure and use tokenization to ensure the card number is never exposed. In addition, virtual cards used within a mobile wallet provide even more payment security, especially if the device owner uses facial recognition or passwords to access their mobile wallet.
5. An opportunity to save—and earn—on travel expenses. Student-athlete and student-group travel is an understood cost center, but credit-based virtual cards offer institutions ways to save on travel expenses and generate revenue. With a credit-based card, your institution only pays for the expenses that students incur. So if they spend less than the per diem, your school benefits from the difference. And because they are credit-based, schools can also earn rebates based on how much they spend.
The days of cash per diems and relying on shared credit cards to fund group travel are quickly waning. Virtual cards such as the U.S. Bank Instant Card® give colleges and universities an easy way to modernize their student travel processes. With Instant Card, you increase the flexibility, security and control of travel spending, while easily monitoring all transactions online.
Explore how virtual cards can improve student travel and allow athletes, student groups and staff to focus less on keeping track of cash—and more on succeeding at their sport or event.