Interview: Oracle VP Of Financial Products Strategy Terrance Wampler

Tech giant Oracle has developed multiple deployment options for its expense management solution, but only for existing customers of the Oracle Fusion business application suite, the Human Capital Management human resources management technology, or its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and PeopleSoft enterprise management solutions. Oracle charges a standalone license fee for the expense product, though Fusion clients can purchase a monthly subscription to use the service. Expense users now can perform various functions on iOS phones, with plans to develop Android functionality as well. Oracle vice president of financials product strategy Terrance Wampler recently spoke with BTN associate editor of payment and expense JoAnn DeLuna about mobile technology, new payment schemes and travel and booking integration. An edited transcript follows.

What is the latest on your mobile offerings and capabilities?

We have mobile capabilities on iOS. When I think about [our] mobile [offerings], I think of it as two components. The first is the end-user receipt-capture component. When the end user is out and about, [he or she] is able to enter expenses on the phone, receive push notifications from their corporate card provider, use voice and calendar control to integrate [expenses] and use character recognition to scan images as needed. There are also future plans to port it to Android and reevaluate each mobile platform based on customer uptake demand as we see it.

The second part of the mobile solution is related to analytics capabilities. This is for the cost center manager or senior manager who wants to understand where spend is, how it's doing against company compliance, average T&E per head, the percentage of travel expense versus the budget, who are the top 10 spenders, etc. We focus heavily on the analytics components being mobile as well, because if you're running an organization that does a lot of T&E management, it's usually a large portion of your budget and you're usually remote yourself.

What trends are you seeing in the travel and expense sector?

We're seeing two things. One is [service providers] trying to enhance mobile by enhancing the user experience in the flow of other things the user might be doing. For example, leveraging push notifications while the user is at a point-of-sale terminal or making matching reconciliation easier. More importantly, [the enhancements are] on the analytics side and being able to access info about T&E cost ... making the experience easier for people to have an understanding about where and why they are spending money on T&E. So we're seeing that the travel and expense piece in mobile is prolific. Every user in that flow is going to need it.

Recently an expense management provider launched its own pre-paid debit card. Do you think more expense providers will get into the payment side?

I have not heard of that. I don't know what the answer is to what individual expense companies will do, but I can tell you that large software companies, like us or SAP, definitely work very hard with corporate card providers like American Express, MasterCard and Visa. We have started to talk to other payment offerings, like Square and PayPal, about better integration of those processes and flows. We haven't talked about Oracle or anyone else taking on that payment or financing instrument piece, because there's a lot of regulation around it. But we definitely talk about maybe having an Amex or MasterCard white-label solution and offer their own expense management and payment solution. We get those requests all the time [from card providers].

What's Oracle's view on booking and expense integration?

That's definitely in our roadmap, but a long-term plan. We did [once have our own booking tool]. We got into the travel business and then moved out of there. [Today] we have relationships with some travel providers on the PeopleSoft side, and we talked to them and what it means for the Fusion uptake and making sure it all works completely as a whole set of apps at Oracle.

We've seen a lot of traction around Human Capital Management. While [clients] want all policy administration, accounting and all the other components related to expenses that are more closely tied to financials to be there—and we have that—we actually are positioning the products more closely to be in that HCM flow so all the tasks the employee might need look and feel the same. One of those components is travel. So absolutely we think that's an important thing to be doing; it's just a timing issue. We think travel is really important from a financial-control perspective because you want to be able to match what you had in terms of travel authorization and budget against what you actually spend. We do offer the ability to provide integration to a travel component, but customers do that at implementation time. The thing we would be talking about is making it more out-of-the-box, more easily integrated as a solution. I know at this point Oracle does not have any plans to actually get into the travel reservation business again.

Integration can definitely be difficult. It's more about what percentage of the employee population is actually doing expenses and travel. For example, in a professional services company, where everyone is typically traveling and filing expenses, we see folks bite the bullet and do integration because it's a very large part of their business. If they have a select set of folks who travel, they're quite happy to have the expense solution more integrated to the financial back end. Some of those smaller to medium enterprises may not contract directly with a specific travel entity. They may just use a standard travel interface available to any one. For us it's more about what percentage of a company is involved in travel and entertainment expense.

Are most of your expense clients existing Oracle clients?

Pretty much. Our target is to sell to Oracle prospects and customers. For existing customers, we will sell expense solutions into that group as we can. When we sell to prospects, our global market strategy is not going to be a standalone expense [tool]. We will sell it as either as part of our cloud HCM offering or as part of our Financials offering when we go sell to prospects.