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Each month, using Solution Suggestions, Concur adds client-suggested enhancements and features to Concur Expense, Travel and Invoice products. As part of evolving Solution Suggestions, Concur archived Concur Expense submissions that did not receive votes or comments in 2016 or 2017 and did not have at least 20 votes (200 points).

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This maintenance allows Concur to focus on suggestions most voted on by the client community.

Company Card

AMEX now offers both Virtual Payments and Charge Back solutions for Hotel or Car Rental in Australia. This means a more consistent service is now supported by concatenating the Description field with the new Merchant Name field, depending on the payment method. Prior to this enhancement, the Merchant Name field populated for Virtual Payments was ignored.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change makes it easier for the traveller to identify which transaction applies to a hotel overnight stay (Hilton; Hyatt), and lets Concur now officially support this AMEX BTA Virtual Payment solution.

AMEX has introduced three new field transactional attributes that are specific for the Brazilian AMEX GL 1022 feed. The purpose of this change is to support conversion of the default USD funds using the Bradesco rate method instead of Concur's OANDA rate or custom rates used by the client. The two conversion rates may differ, which results in account settlement in Company Paid payment types diverging depending on the conversion rate applied to the transaction. In practice, all non-Brazilian GL 1022 fields will experience no changes, as the new fields reside in unused columns applicable only to the Brazilian feed.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change supports the Brazilian market requirements to use the Bradesco rate conversion instead of local client or OANDA rate conversion methods.

Expense Pay – Global

Concur does not allow a delegate user or a proxy user to agree to authorise direct deposits. Only the bank account owner may agree to authorise direct deposits.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change ensures that only a bank account owner, and not a delegate or proxy, can authorise direct deposits from a payment-processing partner.

Our global Expense Pay payment-processing partner, Beanstream, is changing their name to that of their parent company, Bambora. This change will start rolling out on 10 May and will be finalised by the end of June. When you see "Bambora”, think "Beanstream". Bambora acquired Beanstream in September of 2015. For information about Bambora's plans to rename Beanstream, visit the Beanstream website: http://blog.beanstream.com/bambora-group/. There are no changes to your Expense Pay Global Service Agreement or Contract with Beanstream/Bambora. You may notice minor changes on your next bank statement. If you saw the bank descriptors for the funding account direct debit as Beanstream, you will now see it as Bambora.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Concur clients need to realise that Bambora and Beanstream are the same company.

Terminology

In the May release, Concur changed the following Brazilian Portuguese terms.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These changes improve accuracy and consistency of the Brazilian Portuguese version of all Concur solutions.

Beginning in the May release and over the next few months, Concur will be changing the following Dutch terms.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These changes improve accuracy and consistency of the Dutch version of all Concur solutions.

In the May release, Concur changed the following Italian terms.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: These changes improve accuracy and consistency of the Italian version of all Concur solutions.

In the May release, Concur changed the following Swedish term.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change improves accuracy and consistency of the Swedish version of all Concur solutions.

Travel Allowance

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This change helps clients maintain best-practice legal compliance.

Planned Changes

The Quick Tips section of the Concur Solutions home page (concursolutions.com) is targeted to be removed in the July service release.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This update simplifies the home page, making it easier to view and access the information on the page.

Concur is targeting to release the enhanced fiscal calendar for Analysis/Intelligence in July. A fiscal calendar allows organisations to define their accounting periods independent of the standard calendar year. Many organisations define their own calendars to model their financial reporting to reflect seasons in their business, to compare results with direct competitors and to avoid the busy year-end season in January.

The new fiscal calendar will be available in Reporting Configuration, which is accessed via Administration > Expense.

For more information, refer to the release notes for Analysis / Intelligence.

Expense Assistant will soon be available for Expense in July or August. Expense Assistant has the following features:

• The feature is enabled by default for the company, but can be turned off, if needed, at the company level to block access for all users. If the company allows access to Expense Assistant, each individual user will be allowed to opt in to use this feature.

• If there are any expenses in Available Expenses, Expense Assistant will add them to an expense claim.

• If there are any expenses in Available Expenses, Expense Assistant will add them to an expense claim.

For example, if the returned claim contains an ExpenseIt expense, and a credit card transaction that matches that expense is in Available Expenses, when the claim is returned, Expense Assistant will combine the ExpenseIt transaction with the credit card transaction.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This feature automates more of the expense reporting process, to provide an easier end user experience.

Concur plans to retire our legacy Expense Authorisation Request feature on 31 March 2018. Concur offered this feature to some clients prior to the existence of the standalone Concur Request product. We now have feature parity as well as enhanced features and full support on the standalone Request product. Clients that wish to leverage a request capability within Concur should purchase and migrate to the Concur Request product. A client-facing FAQ is available: http://assets.concur.com/concurtraining/cte/en-us/legacy_request_retirement_faq.pdf

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: This retirement allows Concur to focus development resources on further enhancements to our standalone Concur Request product whose functionality, innovation and value now exceeds that of our legacy feature.

Support for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) version 10 browsers under Concur products will end on 18 August 2017. Concur strongly advises clients using IE v.10 to update to the latest IE browser version before that date, or to install and work with another supported browser.

Users still using IE v.10 will see a banner.

Please note these dates:

- EU datacentre: Completed on Tuesday, 4 April 2017

- US datacentre: MOVED TO Wednesday, 12 July 2017

Concur announces an End of Support cycle for version 1.0 of the TLS encryption protocol, continuing support for the more secure 1.1 and 1.2 versions of TLS. As background, the TLS protocol allows secure back and forth communications between a phone or computer and a cloud-based service.

Note that, since less than 1% of Concur users are logging in to Concur Solutions using browsers or phones limited to version 1.0, a very small number of users are affected by this support discontinuation.

PLEASE NOTE NEW END DATE OF SUPPORT

We have moved the date in order to give our clients ample time to understand and make the required manual changes to their browser's security settings. These changes will be detailed in an upcoming service release.

Business Purpose / Client Benefit: Concur is taking this step after careful consideration of both the client’s security and ease of upgrade to the newer, more secure 1.1 and 1.2 versions of TLS. This end of life plan for TLS v 1.0 ensures our clients are communicating with Concur services in a safe and secure manner using TLS v. 1.1 and newer.

The USB IC Card reader solution for capturing Japanese IC Card travel information in Expense utilises a reader connected to a single computer. Because Microsoft is deprecating the ActiveX technology leveraged by this solution, Concur is ending support for the solution.

Important dates:

For the Network IC Card Reader release note, refer to the October 2016 version of this document.

Client Notifications

The list of non-affiliated subprocessors is available here: Concur Non-Affiliated Subprocessors (English Only)

Monthly browser certifications, both current and planned, are available with the other Concur monthly release notes, accessible from What's New - Professional Edition