Fintech Startup Brex reboots its Corporate Travel Platform

Financial company Brex is relaunching its travel booking platform after changing agency partners.

Brex Travel, a new full-service travel management offering, connects to its Empower cost management platform, which launched in 2022.

Technology startup Spotnana will drive the bank’s new venture, after recently revealing that it is backing the new agency Travel Solutions. As a result, Brex is ending a previous partnership with TravelBank, which was recently acquired by US Bancorp.

“For the past few years, we have enjoyed providing Brex with an innovative travel platform to help corporate customers book flights and hotels,” said Duke Chung, co-founder and CEO of TravelBank. “After being acquired by US Bancorp – with its robust corporate card program and our partnership in delivering all-in-one travel, spending and payment solutions – it made sense for both companies to evolve their respective business models.”

Brex is already notifying its customers of the transition.

Fintech trends roll into 2023

Banks are increasingly using travel services as an additional means of keeping customers satisfied. Citi just relaunched its own travel platform with Booking.com, while Capital One continues to expand its partnership with Hopper. New players Ramp and Pleo are also making inroads in combining travel management with digital banking.

For further context, read our megatrends from 2022. The financing of travel and corporate travel is now in the firm grip of the CFO.

California-headquartered Brex now aims to convert its corporate banking customers into travel customers as well. The Empower platform already allows customers to manage cards and spending, so think it’s a perfect fit.

“Many customers wanted a centralized ordering tool so you could enforce policies at the time of search, provide duty of care and many other features,” said Henrique Dubugras, co-founder and co-CEO of Brex. “So we decided to build Brex Travel, and integrated with Brex, so with the same app you can do your business cards, expenses and travel in one place.”

It claims it has two main advantages over traditional travel agencies: better visibility over all travel costs, and more freedom to manage policies. However, many agencies will claim that they already offer it.

Navan (formerly TripActions), for example, began offering cards in 2020 for just this reason, including automated collection of receipts and pre-authorizations, removing the need for employees to manually fill out expense reports.

But Dubugras said Brex also stood out because of Spotnana’s selection of content. “TripActions and Concur are the number one and two places we take customers from,” he said. “The most important thing we hear has to do with the inventory. It’s an unbiased inventory. We don’t take commissions, there’s no incentive for us not to show you the best inventory all the time.”

According to a Brex FAQ document detailing the transition, users will have to pay a service fee to use Spotnana to book trips. “A service fee of $10 will be charged per trip, and a single trip may include any combination of flights, hotels and rental car bookings,” it said.

It is also not entirely certain how much control over travel bookings will be available through the Brex portal. For example, in the FAQ it says: “Can I book for multiple travelers at a time?” The answer is: “Spotnana only allows individual orders. If an admin wants to book for multiple travelers, they can book one at a time by editing the relevant profile on the Spotnana home page.”

Make it simple

Brex Empower, which counts DoorDash, Coinbase and recruitment site Indeed as clients, wants to give companies more freedom to decentralize travel policies.

“One customer said: look, if I give someone a budget, I don’t care if they fly premium economy, or business, or economy, or by train or whatever. If it’s in the budget, they make their own choices,” Dubugras said. “We’re even seeing customers change policies based on the capabilities we have.”

It claims department managers can track a travel budget in real time. It then keeps them accountable, and they can then make better choices about which trips give a higher return on investment.

For Spotnana, this latest partnership is a validation of its vision to offer so-called “microservices” and an extensible data infrastructure.

“We’ve been talking about travel as a service, and I guess the best way to prove it is to let customers adopt it and build solutions that create value for everyone in the ecosystem,” said Sarosh Waghmar, founder and CEO director of Spotnana. “Here, Brex is an example of a channel partner that creates value.”

Dubugras now seems to have caught the travel bug, having recently joined the board of Expedia. “I have started to travel quite up to my knees. Every day I spend more time with Spotnana and their technology, I am even more impressed, he said. “There are a lot of things that will change in travel after this, when we roll this out successfully and this partnership gets real scale.”

Brex may also see a boost in travel customers following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. It is said to have received billions of dollars deposited in recent weeks. Meanwhile, the bank is migrating its current customers to Empower.

Photo credit: Brex Travel aims to offer a wide range of content.