Change your business address
If you're a full access user, you can update your business, registered, mailing and personal addresses within Online for Business and the Business banking app.
University of Salford
A masterclass in optimising expenses.
Read time: 6 mins Added: 03/07/26
For a long time, corporate cards have assisted institutions in facilitating employee expenses. Offering reduced ‘out-of-pocket’ expenses, better cashflow, stronger spend controls, and real-time visibility, the physical corporate card can be beneficial for many institutions. But could there be an even more efficient solution?
For global higher-education institution, the University of Salford, the use of physical cards was contributing to a headache when it came to expense management. International travel purchases regularly resulted in blocked transactions, and time-consuming manual processes required cardholders to code their own expenses. Both of these factors were causing bottlenecks for the university’s finance teams. By upgrading to Lloyds’ Virtual Commercial Card programme – a secure, flexible, and highly controlled digital purchasing card system – the university was able to speed up, simplify and transform their expense management processes.
Revising expense management
With a rich heritage rooted in the 19th century, the University of Salford define themselves as contributing cutting-edge research that corresponds to the challenges and opportunities of the digital revolution. The university employs over 2,500 staff members, ranging from educators and researchers through to administrative support. As part of their research, the university’s community of academics regularly undertake globe-trotting expeditions to conferences around the world – but purchasing travel to lesser-visited destinations was causing issues for the procurement team.
Olivia Ward Senior Purchasing Officer, University of SalfordColleagues within our travel office book a lot of conferences through obscure websites, and they kept getting blocks on their physical cards: whether it was genuine fraud or things that look like fraud. They’re quite a small team, and there were times when almost all of them were without cards since they had to cancel them and wait for replacements. As they control travel for the entire University – this was creating quite a lot of issues for them.
The university had already capitalised on a physical corporate card programme to minimise ‘out-of-pocket’ expenses and maximise spend controls, but card blocking, post-transaction coding, and administrative pressures presented a need for a more sophisticated solution.
Making virtual benefits a reality
The previous process using physical cards was accompanied by a significant administrative burden, consuming a disproportionate amount of time and resource.
“It’s the small things that add up when you have so many to do,” said Olivia. After implementation, the university found that VCP cut administrative duties by removing the physical card from the process and reducing accompanying manual intervention.
The switch enabled the university to generate virtual card numbers for each transaction – mitigating exposure to fraud and ensuring that cardholders aren’t stuck following physical card cancellation.
Olivia Ward Senior Purchasing Officer, University of SalfordThe more Lloyds showed us, the better it looked.
Using VCP has also yielded benefits with transaction reconciliation. Where physical cards require post-transaction coding by staff, often resulting in accuracy issues and extra administrative work, virtual cards eliminate this step. They allow the embedding of custom coding information – such as project codes, cost centres, General Ledger (GL) codes, or budget references – before the transaction ever takes place.
“When people are coding the transactions, they are doing it upfront, rather than having to do it per month”, said Olivia. “That’s probably the biggest time saving. It’s so much easier for the cardholder – they don’t have to set time aside with massive statements.” The change to upfront reconciliation has created back-office efficiencies too: since cardholders have less post-transaction coding to complete per month, the Finance Team aren’t required to spend time chasing cardholder expenses.
The university regarded the reporting capabilities and user experience as an additional benefit of VCP. “It’s just a nice system and feels quite easy to move around,” said Olivia. “It’s quite easy to build your own reports, you can play around with it and delete anything you don’t like – the flexibility on the virtual card system is really good.”
The tool allows businesses to capture new data fields for every transaction, improving both reporting quality and downstream auditability – complete with integration into back-office systems. For Olivia, the main benefit of using VCP was clear: “the reconciliation was such a big thing each month. It surprised me just how much this has actually helped and how well people have taken it.”
Learning with Lloyds
As the University of Salford were eager to take the time to properly transition to a new way of working, Lloyds ensured that they offered support at a pace that suited the university. “People thought it would be more onerous than it turned out to be. We tried to give people the time to buy into it and get their heads around it,” said Olivia. “Lloyds have been so helpful and patient as we wanted to take it slow. They took the time to explain everything – we never felt like we were being rushed through it.”
Lloyds’ systems are inherently designed to promote clarity and minimal training requirements. “It’s very simple,” said Olivia. “Once people had completed one transaction, it’s not something they needed much training on – it’s quite a self-explanatory system.” When system simplicity is combined with a dedicated onboarding process that includes ongoing support, clients can experience a smooth and efficient journey.
Now that the solution is in place, Lloyds will continue to work closely with the university to identify new opportunities for optimisation and efficiency gains.
Joanne Douthwaite Relationship Manager, LloydsFrom supporting clients in the same situation as University of Salford, we understand the pressures that higher education institutions are under with the demand for travel and expenses. We’re pleased to have been able to help the university overcome their expense challenges and look forward to future discussions around further efficiencies we can explore.
Lessons for higher education institutions?
Following their success with virtual cards, the University of Salford realised there were learning experiences to be had for the Higher Education sector, when faced with pressures for quick and uninterrupted expenses and reconciliation. “In our experience, you’re trying to do the most you can with what you’ve got,” said Olivia. “There are very busy times of the year and the more efficient the reconciliation, the better.”
Lloyds have supported the university to revolutionise their expense management processes. For Olivia, the evolution from plastic to virtual is a solution rooted in the client needs of today. “I can’t recommend it enough,” said Olivia. “For our cardholders who don’t need a piece of plastic, it just works so well. It feels like the right kind of solution for the time”.
Let's help you get to the right person
Get in touch with a specialist who can help with your business needs.
You may also be interested in
Keep up to date on LinkedIn
For the latest insights follow our dedicated LinkedIn channel for corporates and institutions.