Marketing of end-to-end travel management solutions is intensifying in Europe as several vendors begin touting their new booking-through-expense solutions, while other expense vendors ramp up sales to corporations looking to streamline their global expense processes.
Concur Technologies, HRG Worldwide and KDS are touting their new booking-through-expense solutions to the multinational market. Long discussed, the actual benefits of end-to-end have yet to be documented. Financial executives are confused by the term, as they consider the second "end" to encompass payment, reconciliation and reporting of all expenses through financial systems. While the new breed of solutions provides handoffs to external systems, they end with expense reporting.
KDS plans next month to unveil the next generation of its integrated online travel and expense management suite. The company has been hyping the new products, code-named Magellan, for several months in an e-mail and blog campaign to travel management professionals.
KDS recently revealed that Magellan is really the next version of KDS Corporate. Primarily known for its booking tools first introduced in 1996, KDS in 2002 developed an expense application. The KDS Expense module works with the booking tool, accepts credit card data feeds and integrates to major corporate financial, human resources and enterprise reporting platforms such as SAP and Oracle.
Travel management company HRG this month launched its new portal in the U.K. market, combining booking, expense, reporting and traveler tools. Announced in July, the portal integrates SpendVision's expense management tools with HRG's booking solutions.
Majority-owned by HRG, SpendVision was developed within Deloitte in 1999 and sold to a management group in 2004. HRG sells the expense tool both as a standalone application service provider product, and as part of its portal. More than 300 government and corporate entities in Australasia and the U.K.are using SpendVision, according to Spendvision Holdings Limited London chief operating officer Shane Bruhns. The company plans to service several thousand customers by the end of the year, with its sales effort focused on the U.K., U.S., China and Japan.
Like other expense products, SpendVision also takes credit card data feeds and integrates to financial and ERP solutions. The company claims its tool is especially adept at managing mobile phone bills, and helping managers and travelers separate personal from business expenses based on numbers identified.
Concur also is touting end-to-end capabilities, boosted by its acquisition of Outtask Cliqbookearlier this year. Integration of the Cliqbook and Concur Expense tool "will be publicly available later this month in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific," according to president and COO Rajeev Singh.
About 10 percent of Concur's revenues come from outside the U.S., but Singh said the company expects that number to rise to between 13 and 15 percent in fiscal 2007. Concur said automated expense management adoption in Europe is in the single-digit percentages, topping out in the low 20s for large markets.
Gelco Expense Management has asked customers about their desire for end-to-end solutions. "The response has been repeatedly that there's no interest and 75 percent of our customers use an online booking tool," said Gelco vice president of marketing Troy Thibodeau. "The value is not there for our end-user community. When the market gets there and we hit the tipping point, we'll create something holistic."
In instances where customers have expressed interest, Gelco has worked out a solution, such as one developed for Boeing to integrate a booking tool with the software version of Gelco's expense products.
Of more interest to its customers, Thibodeau said, are multinational expense deployments that standardize expense policies and processes around the globe. Thibodeau said one reason for this interest is the need for corporations to audit each one of the processes it has in place, to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley or other regulations. Having multiple expense processes around the world increases the cost of auditing and compliance, he noted.
Gelco this summer announced new multinational functionality and the hiring of banking and payment veteran John Lewis as managing director for its recently formed European subsidiary, Gelco Expense Management Limited.
IBM also continues to grow its 20-year-old Global Expense Solutions business. In addition to expense technology offered in 10 languages in more than 40 countries, IBM also offers outsourcing of receipt verification, handling and storage, policy compliance, audits and help desks in its business process transformation services that also include travel procurement and management.