on the UK, while Concur has also been concentrating on the SME market for the last couple of years. Both companies have been making their pitch to smaller businesses by stressing the lack of “upfront costs” to potential clients. Fraedom’s chief commercial officer Kyle Ferguson says: “We want to take the pain of paperwork out of the travel, expense and payment process. We are simplifying the process of booking and managing travel, at the same time as reducing the cost.” Concur’s Vine adds that SMEs’ most common concerns about deploying ex- penses systems are “upfront costs, start-up fees and being tied into long-term con- tracts”. He says: “We have removed these barriers by not having start-up costs and three-month contracts. They don’t have to spend any money or time setting it up. We also give companies the opportu- nity to have all the VAT collected, without them having to know about VAT. We know all the rates that apply for different types of expenses.”
POTENTIAL PROBLEMS
But what will be the barriers to creating this utopian world of automated expense reports, where travellers barely have to touch a button before they make their submission, and managers can see exactly what’s being spent on different categories of travel expense? New ways of paying for items will
present a challenge to existing systems. Traveldoo’s El Aroussi says innova- tions such as mobile payment platform Apple Pay, which has only been launched in the US to date, could be the next hurdle facing expense specialists. “Payment on mobile devices at the point-of-sale will be the next chal- lenge,” he adds. “We will have to see how fast something like Apple Pay is adopted. It’s not even been launched in Europe yet and we don’t know what sort of traction it will get. But I think we will start working on how to capture all that information when somebody uses Apple Pay later this year.” El Aroussi also believes that wearable technology, such as the new Apple Watch, could be used to send notifications about expenses to both approvers and travellers.
34 BBT CORPORATE CARDS SUPPLEMENT 2015
“Payment on mobile devices at the point-of- sale will be the next challenge”
For Concur’s Vine, the next long-term step is the more prosaic task of having automated tools that can correctly sort an itemised hotel bill into the correct categories within the expense report. “With multiple line items, it’s hard for an app to know what’s meant to go where,” he says. “A lot of hotel chains are using their own names or terminology for certain expense types which makes it more difficult to match them up.” Visa Europe’s Harrison thinks that innovations in expense management
CASE STUDY Oakley puts spreadsheets in the shade
SUNGLASSES MANUFACTURER OAKLEY wanted to move its European expenses system away from being a pre- dominantly manual process for its 200 employees across the continent. Pablo Sanz, accounting associate at Oakley, says that it was a “time-con- suming process” for sales staff to submit their expense reports. The finance depart- ment also had to code, pay and archive paper-based forms. “We wanted to do things in a more efficient way – in the 21st century, everything is becoming paperless,” he says.
Oakley was already using Concur as its expense man- agement provider in the US, which led to it being chosen for a pilot scheme in Europe.
“Rather than do a com- plicated implementation all at once, it made more sense for us to start first with a test in Ireland,” says Sanz. “It’s our biggest team, so if it worked there, we knew it would work in the rest of Europe.” He says that the response
from staff is “so far, so good. You always have to deal with the fact that people don’t like change, even if
you’re offering something much easier,
quicker,
cost-saving and efficient, but once I showed them how Concur worked, we didn’t have to fight much to convince anyone.” Sanz expects to benefit personally from the removal of manual processing as the system is rolled out. “I won’t spend 60 per cent of my time stamping every single claim and putting that information into Excel,” he says. “Now, once a month we do the calculation and we only have one posting per country, instead of one per employee.”
In association with
will be “more evolution than revolution” in the next few years. “We will be making it easier by stealth, as people are now used to regular changes in technology – that’s why we do five updates per year for our Intellilink expense management system,” he says. Visa’s planned updates later this year include e-receipts that can be linked to transactions, and the integration of its T&E platform with online booking tools. But Florian Tinnus, Amadeus’s head of
corporate IT, disagrees and thinks it may be time for a radical move away from a multi- spreadsheet experience with per diems and rules. “We equip travellers with mobile scanning of receipts and other fancy enhancements – but no one has yet touched the core issue of making travel expense a revolutionary user experience,” he says. He adds that the technology firm is working on a prototype which he promises will “break the usual flow, include higher automation and make expenses so joyful that you will want to travel even more”. Not many people can have used the
words ‘expenses’ and ‘joyful’ in the same sentence, so we wait with bated breath for the launch of Amadeus’ new product later this year.
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