More T&E Providers Will Add Payments Piece

Corporate travel booking, trip management and expense reporting have become ever more closely integrated in recent years, with travel managers, corporate leadership and employees alike all recognizing the benefits of a unified model. But one major piece of the corporate travel puzzle—payment cards—remains an outlier, largely siloed as a separate service provided by an issuing bank.

But there are signs the walls around corporate payment cards could be lowering, with a spate of travel and expense management providers rolling out payment products of their own over the past several months. By adding an in-house payment piece to their other T&E services, those providers can offer their corporate clients improved data capture, tighter spending controls and simplified reporting and reconciliation. Meanwhile, providers often get a cut of the transaction fees merchants pay for card purchases, tapping into a new, potentially quite significant revenue stream.

Among the corporate T&E players to bring payments into the fold are Expensify—which in October announced its own branded physical and virtual payment card—along with Emburse, the newly rechristened expense conglomerate that arose from the 2019 merger of Certify and Chrome River. Emburse was a corporate payment card startup Certify/Chrome River acquired several months after joining forces, and the rebranded company is in the midst of integrating the payment service across the half-dozen expense brands within its portfolio.

Another high-profile payment provider move came in late 2018, when tech-centric travel management specialist TripActions partnered with startup Divvy and its integrated payment card and expense system. TripActions is rumored to be preparing a new payment product for launch this year. 

Meanwhile, Bento for Business continues to draw interest from investors and corporate clients for its integrated payment card and expense platform, and cloud-based expense provider Fyle recently rolled out an update that enables corporate card payments to flow directly into its expense management tool via application programming interface.

Legacy travel management providers have joined the payments game too. In October, BCD Travel announced it would be the first TMC issuer of card accounts for UATP, the airline-owned payment network. By issuing its own cards, BCD gains direct access to Level 3 transaction data from spend on those cards, such as airline, city pair and class of service. That data, in turn, can flow to BCD’s corporate customers, who are ever hungrier for robust travel data to leverage for strategic planning, budgeting and supplier negotiations, among other uses.

As TMCs grapple with their changing role amid ongoing disruption of traditional distribution models, providing an in-house payment solution can function as an attractive new service for clients. And with demand increasing for virtual card payments in the corporate travel space, many T&E providers likely are looking to play a more central role in delivering virtual card services.

Better data, greater spending control and improved traveler experience all are high on the wish lists of today’s corporate travel managers. As T&E providers look to fulfill those imperatives, offering their own payments products could be a play that pays off handsomely for buyers and suppliers alike in the year ahead.

(Correction, Jan. 28: TripActions in 2018 partnered with Divvy; a previous version of this report incorrectly characterized that relationship as an acquisition.)