When American Express Global Business Travel's deal to acquire CWT was first announced, some industry analysts predicted it wouldn't face much friction on the regulatory side. The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, however, deemed it worth a deeper look, which at minimum has delayed the timeline of the acquisition.
In June, a few months after the March announcement of the merger, the CMA first raised its eyebrow at the deal with the announcement of its investigation as to how it would affect competition. That soon progressed to a "Phase 2" investigation by the CMA, based on its concern that "the deal between two major suppliers of business travel agency services would reduce the pool of providers of these services to [global multinational] customers, which could lead to worse services and higher prices for [global multinational] customers," Mike Walker, the organization's chief economic advisor, said at the time of that announcement.
The resulting report from that investigation, published in November, said the deal would result in less choice and higher prices among large companies, defined within the report as companies with $25 million or more in total transaction volume each year. Only a small number of business travel agencies have the capability of servicing those companies, and the report estimated that Amex GBT and CWT's combined share of business travel services for large companies in the U.K. last year, based on total transaction value, was between 60 percent and 70 percent.
Amex GBT is countering those claims, saying the Authority is focusing on too narrow of a segment, which makes up a small portion of total business travel spending, and is not looking at some of the emerging competition in the market it faces when trying to win those large customers.
However, Amex GBT did offer some possible remedies to the Authority's concerns. Those include opening up CWT's global travel partner network, offering assurances on holding pricing and service levels for customers in the two years following the completion of the merger and possibly divesting some of CWT's customers with a large U.K. presence to other TMCs.
From this point, the CMA is considering those remedies or potentially blocking the merger altogether, and it is scheduled to publish its final report in early January. Amex GBT has said it expects to complete the merger in the first quarter of 2025; the travel management company initially had hoped to complete it by the end of this year.
The CMA is not the only regulatory hurdle the Amex GBT-CWT merger faces, as it is still awaiting approval from the U.S. Department of Justice as well. With an incoming U.S. presidential administration that is largely expected to take a hands-off approach to regulating business, it seems likely that winning over the CMA is going to be the biggest obstacle the two TMCs have in becoming one.