GSA-SmartPay® is the U.S. Federal government’s charge card program. For more than two decades, the Federal government has used charge cards to streamline the process of buying and paying for goods and services, travel, and fleet maintenance expenses.
Today, cardholders use the GSA SmartPay program to pay for a wide variety of goods and services. Across all programs in FY2010, these expenditures amounted to over $30.2 billion for all card types used, spanning over 98.9 million transactions and over 2.8 million card accounts.
GSA SmartPay includes the following card types:
- Purchase Cards - used to pay for the acquisition of goods and services. Represents about 62.3% of the program dollar volume.
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- Travel Cards - used to pay for official Government travel expenses. Represents about 31.8% of the program dollar volume.
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- Fleet Cards - used to pay for fuel and vehicle maintenance and repair. Represents about 5.9% of the program dollar volume.
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- Integrated Cards - provide the convenience of combining the capabilities of several of the other card types in one product.
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In 2008, the program began its third decade of use with a new 10-year GSA SmartPay-2 master contract. Citibank, USBank and JPMorganChase are the prime contract providers, with some specialized fleet card services provided by Voyager or Wright Express. Each Federal agency selects from among the three providers for its specific requirements.
These providers offer various combinations of purchase, travel and fleet card services to Federal agencies and the cards are branded as either Visa™ or MasterCard® under the terms of the GSA SmartPay program. The cards are easily identified by their designs and the leading digits of the account numbers.
Visa cards begin with either 4486, 4614, or 4716.
MasterCard cards begin with 5564, 5568 or 5565.
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