Conferma's Jason Lalor discusses:
- Continued dedication to corporate travel investment amid expansion plans
- New executive structure for global ambitions
- Improving hotel virtual card acceptance
Conferma in February dropped the "Pay" from its name as part of a rebranding initiative in which the fintech company is broadening its focus beyond corporate travel. CEO Jason Lalor, who joined the company a little more than a year ago, spoke recently with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker about the rebrand, what it will mean for the company's work in the corporate travel space and its recent executive reorganization. An edited transcript follows.
BTN: What does a rebrand mean in terms of Conferma's focus and priorities?
Jason Lalor: With the rebrand, the first thing we wanted to do is look at how easy it is to work with us and what was our core strength. Our restated mission is to make it simple for any company anywhere in the world to do business, and in doing that, we wanted to streamline payment processes so that those businesses can seamlessly connect and pay. Outdated payment processes are causing significant business challenges and inefficiencies, and we wanted to deliver new and elegant solutions to enable faster and simpler payments.
We've been a pioneer in the virtual payment space for nearly two decades, and this little fintech from Manchester is now a global powerhouse, where we're connecting 75-plus banks, 150 travel platforms connecting off of 500 global [travel management companies]. So, that is being connected to all the major card issuers, including Visa, Mastercard and American Express, in the service of thousands of corporate travelers.
We wanted to make sure that the brand represented that connectivity and the API that we're famous for, and in doing so, go beyond the travel space. We ultimately see other ecosystems that we can apply our technology to, and we're looking at areas like accounts payable, procurement and freight, to name a few. For me, there is a wider opportunity in that new ecosystem development. The rebranding initiative and the work we're done since I've come into the company with the team is all about enabling us to take advantage of that opportunity. There is a changing landscape. You look at B2B payments, and there's $110 trillion a year of B2B payments going through the system. Of that, there's expected to be about $6.8 billion on virtual cards by 2026.
We feel that with the rebranding, which is not just putting pictures and logos, it's about what we stand for, our mission and our values, that we're perfectly invested in and set up to go to the next level of ecosystem development.
BTN: But will travel still be a major focus for Conferma?
Lalor: We will never forget what has made us famous. The ecosystem that is travel has enabled this company to grow and prosper, and one of our key strategic pillars is to continue to strengthen in this travel space, and that's across a whole slew of areas, including improving the experience on hotel acceptance, improving and investing in product development, improving our invoice reconciliation, just to name a few. That is a strategic pillar and a key one that will not go away. We will continue to play in that space. We will strengthen our leadership position there.
BTN: How has Conferma expanded customer service capabilities?
Lalor: When I took a step back and looked at the business over 12 months ago, there were a few areas we knew we needed to invest into. Our underlying technology and our service and operations is something we're laser-focused on right now. We recently introduced 24/7 service capability, which is a first for us, and effectively being able to offer that frontline support 24/7 globally is a key departure for the business. We've been investing heavily into hiring additional staff in our service centers but also developing our existing staff to make sure the standard of service is where it needs to be in order to scale this business.
BTN: You've had some leadership restructuring recently. What was the reasoning for that?
Lalor: The commercial team here is extremely strong, and it has been for 15 or 16 years. Coming into my role, we took a close look at all of the teams to see where we would add to and strengthen. Another of our strategic imperatives is to ensure that we are a global company, and in doing so, I wanted to ensure that our regions have got autonomy and empowerment to run a region in their own right.
The first move was to bring in a new chief commercial officer, Sonya Geelon. Sonya is a powerhouse commercially and someone I have worked with in the past and I have 100 percent trust and faith in and rely on heavily to really bring in some new levels of quality and standards into the commercial teams.
Equally, we brought in Ben Alderman. He was ex-Visa, ex-American Express, ex-Ramp, and he was very skilled across the dual areas of payments of travel. Ben has come in to run the U.S. for us as well as the global travel business. I wanted to make sure we had someone of Ben's caliber and quality on the ground in the U.S., where a lot of our partners and customers are based, so he can run that effectively and efficiently. We've been adding to Ben's team over the last four or five months with additional personnel across account management and business development.
In the APAC region, Adam Williams has been with the company for a while and was of high caliber that we wanted to recognize Adam's work, and Adam has gone in as head of commercial for our regions.
There has been a real focus on going global with the hiring of that kind of talent. One of our key values that we redefined last year was to be customer-obsessed. There're no better people in the business to drive that forward than the three individuals I just mentioned as well as the teams they run.
BTN: What has Conferma's acquisition by Sabre meant for the company?
Lalor: When you go back to the point I made about Conferma's claim to fame being to connect the travel ecosystem, Sabre has been a key part of that. We've been longtime partners of Sabre before the acquisition happened in August 2022. That investment stake demonstrated their trust in this business, and our people and our tech. They saw value in Conferma, and we're seeing the value of our relationship with them.
In terms of the benefit that's brought, we got access to their unrivaled technology expertise, and that's crucial to our business as we take the next step forward, in terms of our growth story. Sabre understands that business, what we need to do to grow and be successful both inside and outside the travel space. They recognized the importance of Conferma's independence, and we can't connect these ecosystems if we're working on a preference basis for partners. What we've got is this powerhouse investment in Sabre, but recognizing that our strength is in that ability to connect partners. What they've managed to do is respect that independence while still working closely as an investor and a key commercial partner on a day-to-day basis.
BTN: How does that independence work on the network side, with deep partnerships both with Visa and Mastercard?
Lalor: Visa is one of the major card schemes we've integrated with, and that's through Visa Commercial Pay product. It's a hugely important partnership for us. Visa has been committed to supporting us and are working with use to support their corporate clients, and they've done that through their vision of digitization journeys. That relationship with them is very strong. They see us as one of the leading providers of virtual payments tech, and we've made the commitment to accelerate the growth of virtual cards in the industry, and our strategic partnerships with major card issuers such as Visa allow us to do that, keeping in mind of course that we're connected equally to Mastercard, who are an investor alongside being a commercial partner and American Express.
Visa announced some partnerships we're doing with them in [Latin America] as they continue to expand, and equally we're working closely with Mastercard on expansion of their virtual card offering as well. Across all of the payment schemes, we have very strong relationships and a real solid understanding of the benefit that an independent partner like Conferma is bringing to the table from a technology perspective.
BTN: How has Conferma been working to improve hotel acceptance of virtual cards?
Lalor: We know that the core part of the business right now is about effective deployments of virtual cards to serve corporate travelers in the hotel space. I spent some time working with our product and tech teams and commercial teams last year, understanding what barriers prevent and were stopping it from growing. The mission is to ensure that we continue to increase the number of card deployments for hotel bookings globally.
I made some decisions last year to invest heavily into our developer team, based here in Manchester. We've set up our teams to where we have a team dedicated to just developing product and code to help with the acceptance improvement for virtual cards at hotels. Within our product group, there's a team just solely focused on that.
Commercially, we are extremely close with the hotel groups, and I've invested into additional commercial people into those teams. We listen to the hotel partners that we have as well as the travel management companies who are key partners for us. We recognize that there is room for improvement in virtual card acceptance at hotels. It's probably No. 1 right now in terms of investment priorities. As time goes by, we will start to probably to demonstrate what those acceptance rates are looking like.
If you took a step back and listed the combination of investment decisions in our customer service operations alongside the investment in product development and R&D, specifically in the hotel acceptance base, then underscored by a renewed commercial focus working with hotels directly and the TMCs, you're going to see an improvement here, and that barrier to entry will be diminished and ultimately removed over time.
BTN: What opportunities will AI technology open for Conferma?
Lalor: We're using AI right now, for example, for invoice recognition products, Snap Plus, to improve the instances of positive matching between the travel invoice and the travel management company and the hotel. We definitely see an opportunity, but we like to assess the opportunities to ensure if we make decisions around AI, ultimately the end user and partners are getting the benefit they need. It's something we look at daily.