During the early days, and perhaps even early years, of expense management provider Chrome River's existence, when people at parties would ask co-founder and CEO Alan Rich what his company did, nobody really understood his answer.
"They would just glaze over and say, 'What?' " he recalled.
But times in the travel and expense management world have changed since the company's 2007 launch. IBM in May 2014 acknowledged it would retire its longtime Global Expense Reporting Solution, choosing as a partner expense provider Concur. In another twist, IBM competitor SAP in December acquired Concur in an $8.3 billion deal, one of the biggest cloud technology acquisitions in history.
"One of the things that was good about the [Concur] acquisition was that people were pretty impressed with the valuation Concur got, and it made everyone realize that this is a really cool and exciting area of the industry," Rich said. "T&E is not boring—it's exciting."
While SAP and Concur CEO Steve Singh have said Concur will continue to operate as a "separate business unit," it is unclear what will become of SAP's own Cloud for Travel and Expense product. Rich believes SAP ultimately will sunset the solution, opening up more opportunities for Chrome River to win clients.
"It hasn't been formerly announced, but it only makes sense, and I think all of their customers are assuming that as well," Rich said. "We always thought we had three big competitors: SAP, Oracle and Concur. … Now we've gone from three to two competitors, and for us that's a really good thing."
IBM's planned exit from expense reporting also has led Chrome River to several big client wins. The firm in August 2014 announced audio and entertainment manufacturer and former GERS client Harman International, with 13,000 employees, as a new Chrome River client.
Late last year, telecom infrastructure company Goodman Networks, with 5,000 employees, chose Chrome River as its expense provider to replace GERS. Chrome River in the fourth quarter of 2014 claimed several additional wins of former GERS clients, including food and beverage distributer KeHE, which has 4,000 employees; media company Salem Communications, which has 500 employees; aerospace and defense technology company Data Device Corp., which has 350 employees; and a firm Chrome River wouldn't identify but described as a Fortune 50 company with 40,000 employees.
"All these customers are really knowledgeable because they're coming off of a pretty sophisticated system that IBM had, so it's an excellent validation for us to fit in large organizations," Rich said.
Chrome River claimed two additional wins in the fourth quarter that weren't former GERS clients: Manufacturer of household products Masco Corp., which has more than 20,000 employees, and an undisclosed company with about 45,000 employees.
Last month, the International Air Transport Association chose Chrome River as its expense provider across 50 countries and will integrate the system with its SAP enterprise resource planning and travel management system.
Chrome River indicated that in December 2014 processed 1.2 million transactions, a 42 percent increase year over year.
Funding Success
Chrome River in January 2014 raised $17 million in Series C financing. The company at the time said it planned to use the funds to expand into U.S. and other markets as well as add new product features. A year later, the company said it has delivered.
"We're a big believer of that when you grow, you have to grow proportionately across all the different dimensions in the company," Rich explained.
The funding was distributed to to "every part of the business," meaning Chrome River has increased its sales team by a third in the United States and the United Kingdom. It also has grown its support team so that it can handle a wider range of service hours globally.
Chrome River has and continues to invest on integrations with third parties for business analytics and mobile services. In June 2014, it partnered with Grasp Technologies for travel data and Western Union Business Solutions for cross-border payment processing. Most recently, it completed a project with American Express for card integration and real-time data feeds.
"We're seeing a lot of corporate credit card integrations that are interesting and challenging to do all the time, but are particularly challenging to do on a global scale," Rich said when asked what kinds of solutions travel managers are seeking. "The same kind of challenge sometimes occurs in dealing with the travel management company."
Additionally, Chrome River is working on a data analytics and exploration project, called Data Discovery, that involves reporting, dashboards and big data. It partnered with software company Information Builders to use each other's technologies. Rich said Chrome River will apply tools used in other technology sectors to the travel industry's specific business problems in an effort to discover data patterns.
"We're also doing some cool technology with imaging that goes beyond even what [optical character recognition] is capable of doing," Rich said.
These investments, expansions and technology innovations, according to Rich, contribute to Chrome River's three keys to success: having a "memorable user interface," having superior technology and having "cool features other people don't have."
"What makes us stand out? It's that we've succeeded in all three dimensions," he said. "If you have one, it's not enough. You really have to have all three."