Conference season is underway, bringing business opportunities alongside hours of wasted time spent on employee travel expense reimbursement.
Business travelers know the drill: They dig up a hotel bill and start the painstaking process of entering every line item—parking, dining, taxes, service fees, and more—into an expense report. But business trips don’t have to end in frustration. Automatically itemizing hotel bills is just one of the ways fintech is revolutionizing the travel and expense process.
Fintech to the rescue
Fintech’s role in revolutionizing corporate travel is part of a broader movement in which travel and fintech are merging in innovative ways for the first time. Stakeholders are integrating fintech into travel products to eliminate inefficiencies, improve the traveler experience, and create new revenue streams.
Consumer travel companies introduced fintech solutions to address friction in buyers’ journeys through credit card partnerships; buy now, pay later (BNPL) offerings; tools to ease cross-currency transactions; and protections for flights, hotels, and car rentals.
Now fintech is eliminating or easing pain points for business travelers, travel managers, and finance teams by powering all-in-one solutions that reimagine business travel.
Corporate travel has historically been rife with inefficiencies, including multiple travel and expense management systems, limited spend control and visibility, time-consuming manual reconciliation, and slow reimbursement. Companies seeking to modernize their travel management capabilities often tacked on a new solution that addressed one problem while adding to the overall complexity.
This inefficient process of cobbling together products is no longer effective or necessary. Modern expense management solutions are leveraging fintech to address corporate travel challenges and craft a seamless T&E experience.
Below are five ways fintech is revolutionizing corporate travel.
1) A unified travel booking, payments, and expense management platform creates a seamless process.
Legacy corporate travel solutions often employ a best-in-breed model, with companies selecting a separate travel management company (TMC), an online booking tool (OBT), and an expense management solution. These multiple disparate systems lack integration, resulting in time-consuming work, including paper receipts and manual reconciliation.
Fintech is powering a new generation of all-in-one tools that integrate travel booking, itinerary management, corporate cards, and expense management into a unified solution. This development allows travel and finance managers and travelers to enjoy the time and cost savings that come with a seamless process.
2) Centralized billing and corporate cards streamline payments.
Travelers have traditionally carried the burden of paying for travel expenses and waited, sometimes for months, to be reimbursed. A modern expense management solution empowers companies to provide travelers with physical or virtual cards, so employees don’t have to front their own money.
Finance teams also receive a record of each traveler’s spend in real time, dramatically streamlining reconciliation. Instead of tracking down proof of expenses booked on personal cards, administrators have the information at their fingertips. Removing this burden from employees with a centralized solution is even more important in the current macroeconomic environment.
3) Customizable spend policies increase compliance.
Companies operating on legacy systems often spend time carefully setting travel policies only to have travelers book off-platform, resulting in murky compliance and rising costs.
With a modern fintech solution, finance teams can establish dynamic spend policies and customize limits down to the department or individual. Policy is automatically enforced at the point of purchase, eliminating out-of-policy transactions before they happen. |
Compliance dramatically increases with the policy integrated into the product and enforced in real time. By removing out-of-policy spend – either accidental or intentional – travelers and finance teams save time and avoid headaches.
4) Automated expense reporting eliminates inefficiency.
It’s time-consuming and irritating to carry paper receipts and manually complete expense reports. Lost receipts, reporting delays, and incomplete information create headaches for travelers and accountants. After all, finance teams are left having to chase employees for explanations before approving reimbursement and reconciling expenditures.
Fintech-forward expense management solutions eliminate the frustration of expense reporting. Employees swipe their corporate card or snap a photo of their receipt, and the system automatically categorizes and reconciles the purchase. This streamlined process eliminates manual expense reporting for travelers and makes it easy for finance teams to track and manage spend.
5) Hotel folio technology leverages automation to save time and reduce errors.
Employees and finance teams historically had to itemize each line of a hotel folio instead of listing the hotel expense as a single large transaction. The cost of the room had to comply with a company’s hotel policy, while room service could be counted towards a daily per diem. When finance teams only received the grand total, they had to follow up with the employee for context, yielding a frustrating and time-consuming experience.
Modern expense management solutions have introduced auto-itemization into hotel folios by leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, and translation technology. This feature automatically splits and categorizes individual transactions into multiple line items.
Instead of separating and identifying expenditures as part of a whole, travelers and finance managers can simply review and approve the automatically generated report.
Conclusion
No question: Fintech is powering the next generation of corporate travel and expense solutions. Companies reliant on legacy systems are plagued with inefficiencies, spiraling costs, and limited spend visibility. Employees have carried the economic burden of business travel on personal cards while navigating costly, time-consuming manual expense processes alongside finance teams.
All-in-one solutions, such as TripActions, have reimagined the entire T&E experience with unified travel and expense management tools that eliminate traditional expense reports, reconcile purchases automatically, and offer unprecedented control and visibility into spend.
As a result, companies that implement these fintech-forward solutions have seen dramatic savings in time and money—and happier employees. Let’s face it: Employees who aren’t saddled with busy work can focus on what matters most—the future of the business.