People are hitting the road again for business, but doing so in a way in which there's less separation between professional and private lives.
The technology firms TripActions Liquid and Mesh recently introduced corporate expense products that aim to shorten or eliminate steps in how employees report business-related payments and receive reimbursement. The strategies accommodate an emerging business culture in which people travel more often, but still remain largely remote from their employer's central office.
"Remote and distributed workforces require a new level of control and digital corporate spend tools," said Oded Zahavi, CEO of the New York-based Mesh Payments.
TripActions in March launched an automated itemization product that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically assign line items on a receipt to expense categories, then apply company policy to each item. It's designed to remove manual reporting by employees and vetting of individual items by an employer.
Hotel costs, for example, include a number of charges for various fees and services during a stay, but the traveler's card payment to the hotel is recorded as a single transaction. Employees have traditionally recorded these line items individually in expense reports submitted to their employer's finance department. That department then manually determines which line items are within policy which are not. The employee, who normally makes these payments on his or her own card, is reimbursed later.
"There's a lot of expenses when people travel and most employees can't spend their company's money [directly], so it creates complications when there's a mix of personal and business expenses," said Michael Sindicich, general manager and head of TripActions, which is based in Palo Alto, California.
While that's how travel reporting and reimbursement has worked for years, Sindicich contends artificial intelligence can automate most of that manual work by improving accuracy over time. And open banking can speed reimbursements for a string of payments on an employee card that are a mix of work and non-work related expenses.
TripActions uses Plaid and "other fintech enablers" to route data between an employees' bank account and the employer's account and travel policies. That mix can automatically itemize what payments fit within corporate policy. That helps the employee choose which purchase to expense before the point of sale.
"Open banking is a huge part of this. There's a knowledge that the purchase is within policy" Sindicich said. "The managers aren't asking questions later on about individual items or fees or purchases."
TripActions, which didn't disclose how many users it has for the new product, does not charge fees for companies with fewer than 50 users per month. Its fee is $50 per month for clients with more than 50 users. TripActions also recently implemented a Coinbase integration that allows users to be reimbursed to their Coinbase wallet and convert funds to more than 100 crypto currencies.
"This is a good use case for open banking," said Clayton Weir, an open banking expert who is CEO and co-founder of FiSpan, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based financial services technology company that does not sell employee expense management services. "This is one of many business problems that can be resolved by real-time access to financial data," Weir said.
Mesh is looking to eliminate corporate expense reporting entirely. Mesh, in partnership with Visa, has launched a numberless business card that allows users to link virtual cards to physical cards that can be customized based on the user's need or the employer's policies. Finance managers have full control over the physical card that backs the virtual cards, allowing the managers to disable cards, change PINs or swap the virtual card remotely.
"At many companies, employees have to cover expenses upfront and then submit for reimbursement," said Zahavi. Since the virtual cards can be tailored, companies can provision a special-use corporate card for an employee that may not typically need one on a permanent basis.
"So for example, if an employee is going to a trade show and needs the ability to pay for supplies, a card can be provisioned for this specific use case," Zahavi said.
There are signs of life for business travel after two years of steep declines during the pandemic. Three in four travel managers expect travel volume at their company will be much higher (17%) or higher (58%) in 2022 than in 2021. Only 12% say it will remain the same and 5% expect it to be lower, according to the
The demand for better employee expense management tools is driven by both the return to travel and flexible work arrangements, Weir said. That leads to more opportunities for people to use their own card for both personal and business expenses at the same time.
"You have the potential, for example, of someone traveling to Nashville for a conference, and then staying in Nashville on their own dime to work remotely there for a week or so after the conference," Weir said.
Mesh and TripActions are also part of a wider trend within payment technology to pair fintech with recruitment. For example,
Removing the hassle of expense reporting can be a similar benefit, according to Weir.
"For business owners, there is pressure to avoid high friction for anything related to staff. It's not something people tolerate anymore," Weir said. "A new job is just a Zoom call away."
