Egencia soon will pilot an expense offering, Egencia Open
Sync, which will allow travelers to sync their personal and corporate cards to
capture all business travel-related spend conducted outside Egencia's booking
tool, chief product officer Michael Gulmann told BTN.
Egencia already has been sending flight, hotel and car expenses
incurred through its booking tool to expense partners like Concur. While some
expense management systems can sync with corporate cards to capture other
spending, Gulmann said companies don't always pay for that extra integration.
Additionally, some companies, typically small- and midsize enterprises, do not
issue corporate cards, leaving travelers to use personal cards, creating extra
work for them when they file expenses.
Egencia's new capability comes through an unnamed data-aggregation
partner that pulls transactions from credit card issuers, Gulmann said. The
traveler links the card so charges can feed into Egencia, inputs the travel dates,
unchecks irrelevant charges and photographs receipts through the Egencia app.
The system automatically pairs charges and receipts, and then the traveler sends
the collated expenses to the their expense tool.
A traveler whose company doesn't have an expense system can
print a copy of the report, Gulmann said. "Many of our customers either do
not have an expense company or … have decided not to pay for the additional
services of all the linkages. And even if they have, we don't feel it's a great
technology or a great customer experience. A lot of people use their personal
cards, as well. That's the piece of the market that we're really solving. When
you're using Costco Citibank card, there's no connection at that point to your
expense provider."
Orbitz for Business, which came over with the acquisition by
Expedia in 2015, integrated with third-party expense suppliers that connected
personal cards to expense. A spokesperson for Egencia confirmed that Open Sync
is not built on Orbitz for Business technology or partnerships.
Deepening Connectivity
Egencia proclaims a commitment to application programming
interface connections with T&E, travel risk management and enterprise
resource planning providers through its Egencia Open Connect Platform. The
Egencia platform has integrated with Egencia-owned Traveldoo to allow mutual
users to perform Traveldoo Expense tasks within Egencia, Gulmann said. "We
want to make it seamless. … Then [users] have the ability to have the expense
system and travel system in one place," he said.