TripActions has become the latest provider to bring expense
management and payment products under one roof, adding in-house expense
management functionality to its Liquid payment card.
First launched
in February, the Liquid platform features physical and virtual Visa-branded
credit cards that can be used to book travel via TripActions' and other booking
tools, and to make in-trip payment at brick-and-mortar merchants, such as
restaurants, with managers able to set trip budgets and other spending
parameters. Previously, approved purchases made via Liquid were sent to
whichever third-party expense management system the client company used. Now,
the entire process can be completed within the Liquid platform, which has added
"full expense management capability" according to TripActions.
"The innovation we've built out over the past several
months is the ability to completely replaces your expense management
system," said Michael Sindicich, general manager, TripActions Liquid.
Combining
a payment tool with expense management and reporting functions within Liquid helps
give companies clearer visibility into corporate spending that is becoming more
distributed across a given organization—with employees increasingly making a
wider range of purchasing decisions, including travel booking, Software as a
Service subscriptions, advertising and other expenses, according to Sindicich. Already
a rising trend, such decentralized spending patterns have been "vastly
accelerated" by the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant rise of the
work-from-home ecosystem, which has given workers more purchasing autonomy, he noted.
Legacy infrastructure, which often takes the form of a
patchwork of different corporate cards, P-cards, procurement systems and
expense management tools, is ill-suited to serve this modern corporate spending
paradigm, and "really burdens," employees, managers and accounting
teams, Sindicich said.
But while Covid has in many ways increased the value
proposition of an all-in-one payment and expense system, the plan to add
expense functionality was in the works before the pandemic took hold, according
to Sindicich, who said that TripActions clients long had requested that the
company add in-house expense management functionality.
"Nothing on our roadmap got edited [by Covid]; it got
accelerated," Sindicich said—adding that the ability for companies to implement
quickly and enforce Covid-related spending restrictions—such as not allowing
lunches to be expensed for work-from-home employees—necessitates a payment tool
that is directly linked to policy management and expense reporting.
"Unless you're controlling [spend] through the payment
method, you don't get that visibility in real time; you have to wait until the
employees submit those expenses weeks or months later," Sindicich said of
unapproved expenses.
TripActions, which recently rolled out a new enterprise
version of its platform for larger clients, is not shy about its plans to
challenge the dominance of corporate card providers such as American Express,
and expense management providers like Concur in that segment.
"We actually see this as mostly for the enterprise and
midmarket segment," Sindicich said of Liquid, noting that the company
already counts several Fortune 500 companies, along with major midmarket
firms like Lyft and Zoom, among clients using the platform. "So this ties
in well with our enterprise strategy."