The United States and Canada will soon see launch of Visa's new meetings card. The credit card company has also unveiled an alliance with meetings technology provider Arcaneo.

This will pave the way for Visa to launch the product in its Central Europe, Middle East and Africa region. It will launch the card in European Union countries in the third quarter of this year, with Asia Pacific following in 2009.

Specific offerings of the meetings card will vary based on a company's needs, and can include authorisation control and limited-use capabilities. Cards will be issued to individual buyers or for individual meetings.

"We felt that timing was right," said Louis Goodson, senior business leader for Visa Commercial Solutions. "Each company's approach to managing meetings is diverse. There's no single answer. In companies that we've talked to they don't want to be shoehorned into a specific model."

The alliance with Arcaneo allows Visa or card issuers to transmit transaction data into Arcaneo's Metron meetings management solution, allowing customers to view actual spend against a particular meeting's budget. The data feed is sent to the user daily.

"We knew that there would be a need for companies that wanted to have not only reporting for meetings after the fact, but really wanted to have an end-to-end solution," Goodson said. "Their solution provides not only the back-end reconciliation reporting capabilities, but also allows for meeting planners to plan at a detailed level up front."

Once charges are uploaded into Metron, they can either be automatically applied to a meeting's budget or a buyer can go in and manually apply charges to lines of spend.

Companies wishing to use the Visa Meetings card do not have to be Visa clients.