5 ways fintech is revolutionizing corporate travel

Conference season is underway, bringing business opportunities along with hours of wasted time spent on employee travel expenses.

Business travelers know the drill: They dig up a hotel bill and begin the painstaking process of entering each item—parking, dining, taxes, service charges and more—into an expense report. But business trips don’t have to end in frustration. Automatic specification of hotel bills is just one of the ways fintech is revolutionizing the travel and spending process.

Fintech to the rescue

Fintech’s role in revolutionizing corporate travel is part of a wider movement where travel and fintech are merging in innovative ways for the first time. Stakeholders are integrating fintech into travel products to eliminate inefficiencies, improve the travel experience and create new revenue streams.

Consumer travel companies introduced fintech solutions to address friction in shopper journeys through credit card partnerships; buy now pay later (BNPL) offer; tools to facilitate cross-currency transactions; and protection for flights, hotels and rental cars.

Now, fintech eliminates or alleviates pain points for business travelers, travel managers and finance teams by powering all-in-one solutions that reinvent business travel.

Corporate travel has historically been fraught with inefficiencies, including multiple travel and expense management systems, limited spend control and visibility, time-consuming manual reconciliation, and slow reimbursement. Companies looking to modernize their travel management capabilities often settled on a new solution that solved one problem while increasing overall complexity.

This inefficient process of intertwining products is no longer efficient or necessary. Modern expense management solutions leverage fintech to meet corporate travel challenges and create a seamless T&E experience.

Below are five ways fintech is revolutionizing corporate travel.

1) A unified platform for travel booking, payments and expense management creates a seamless process.

Legacy corporate travel solutions often use a best-in-breed model, with companies choosing 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 powers 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 invoicing and company cards streamline payments.

Travelers have traditionally shouldered the burden of paying travel expenses and waited, sometimes for months, to be reimbursed. A modern solution for expense management allows companies to provide travelers with physical or virtual cards, so that employees do not have to front their own money.

The financial teams also receive an overview of each individual traveller’s consumption in real time, which dramatically streamlines reconciliation. Instead of tracking down evidence of expenses posted on personal cards, administrators have the information at their fingertips. Removing this burden from employees with a centralized solution is even more important in today’s macroeconomic environment.

3) Customizable spending guidelines increase compliance.

Companies operating on legacy systems often spend time carefully setting travel policies only to have travelers book off-platform, resulting in unclear compliance and increasing costs.

With a modern fintech solution, finance teams can establish dynamic spending policies and adapt limits down to the department or individual. The policy is automatically enforced at the point of purchase, eliminating out-of-policy transactions before they happen. |

Compliance increases dramatically with policy integrated into the product and enforced in real time. By removing out-of-insurance expenses – whether accidental or intentional – travelers and finance teams save time and avoid headaches.

4) Automated expense reporting eliminates inefficiencies.

Carrying around paper receipts and manually completing expense reports is time-consuming and annoying. Lost receipts, reporting delays and incomplete information create headaches for travelers and accountants. After all, finance teams have to chase employees for explanations before approving reimbursements and reconciling expenses.

Fintech-forward expense management solutions eliminate the frustration of expense reporting. Employees swipe the company card or snap a picture of the 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 expenses.

5) Hotel folio technology leverages automation to save time and reduce errors.

Employees and finance teams have historically had to itemize each line item in a hotel folio rather than enter the hotel charge as a single large transaction. The price of the room had to follow a company’s hotel policy, while room service could be counted against a daily allowance. When finance teams only received the total, they had to follow up with the employee for context, which made for a frustrating and time-consuming experience.

Modern expense management solutions have introduced automatic specification in 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 expenses as part of a whole, travelers and finance managers can simply review and approve the automatically generated report.

Conclusion

No doubt: Fintech is driving the next generation of travel and expense solutions for businesses. Companies that rely on legacy systems are plagued with inefficiency, rising costs and limited visibility into consumption. Employees have borne the financial burden of business travel on personal cards while navigating costly, time-consuming manual expense processes with finance teams.

All-in-one solutions, like TripActions, have reimagined the entire T&E experience with unified travel and expense management tools that eliminate traditional expense reports, automatically reconcile purchases, and provide unparalleled control and visibility into spend.

As a result, companies implementing these fintech-forward solutions have seen dramatic savings in time and money – and happier employees. Let’s face it: Employees who don’t struggle with busy work can focus on what matters most – the future of the business.