Cornell University is bringing some of the money it spends home to Tompkins County, and saving some for itself, by adopting Tompkins County Trust Co. (TCTC) as the vendor for the Visa cards used by campus faculty and staff.

The cards, known on campus as procurement cards, are used by campus departments for purchases up to $500 -- everything from taking a visiting professor to lunch to buying office supplies. The card system is a big timesaver for the university because it eliminates the need to process purchase orders or personal reimbursements for those purchases.

Cornell's contract with TCTC was signed in mid-June. TCTC will issue new cards to Cornell staff in early August.

The procurement card program was launched in August of 1997 in cooperation with Corestates Bank of Wilmington, Del., a pioneer in offering such services, which later merged into First Union Bank of Charlotte, N.C. While many of the purchases made with the cards are local, a small percentage of every transaction was going to North Carolina as the credit card provider's fee. From now on, that share will go to TCTC, increasing the assets the bank has for loans and other local services.

"We've been in the card-issuing business for many years, so this is not a complete departure for us," said Ben Herrmann, TCTC vice president for retail banking, noting that his bank already serves some 40,000 credit card customers.

Right now, more than 3,000 Cornell faculty and staff members are using procurement cards and collectively charging over a million dollars a month, according to Kathy Dymock, procurement card administrator for the university's Office for Purchasing Services. Dymock said she expects to see those numbers increase rapidly over the coming year because her department is encouraging the use of the cards and is offering a new, simplified online training program for those who use them.

"There are several advantages Tompkins County Trust can offer us," Dymock said. "The most important is the fact that they are local. If you pick up the phone and call with a

question, they're going to be well aware of who Cornell is; they're just going to have a lot more information. Also, they are better able to handle transactions on campus, moving money from one department to another."

As part of the arrangement, TCTC will offer a reduced fee for on-campus transactions, such as when a department makes a purchase from the Campus Store.

"We are also quite active in the merchant-processing business, serving over 1,700 merchants," Herrmann said. What this means, he explained, is that when you make a credit card purchase with these merchants, no matter what card you use, the merchant's side of the transaction is handled by TCTC. "Because we do both halves of the business, we were able to bring some economies to Cornell," he said.