TripActions has partnered with corporate virtual payments startup Teampay, enabling mutual clients of the two companies to use Teampay virtual cards to pay for bookings made within TripActions' travel management platform, the companies announced this month.
Teampay positions its service as a payment method for all types of corporate operating expenses, such as office supplies and software subscriptions. But the New York-based company, which launched in 2016, has set its sights on growing its presence in the corporate travel sector, including via partnerships with travel management providers.
That effort has helped advance Teampay's original model, which uses a Slack-based bot as the primary medium for requesting and delivering its virtual payment cards.
Under the new partnership with TripActions, Teampay's virtual cards can be loaded into users' TripActions accounts and used as the payment method to fund travel bookings made within TripActions' platform.
"Teampay will manage the full approval process workflow and payment," Miles Macleod, director of channels and alliances for Teampay, told BTN. That setup gives travel and purchasing managers "upfront controls to approve the spend amount before the purchase has been made," he said.
Macleod said the decision to partner with TripActions was driven by three main factors: customer alignment, with both companies serving largely similar client bases; direct feedback from mutual customers who wanted to be able to use Teampay cards within TripActions; and the companies' shared focus on employee experience. Beyond the initial integration of Teampay with the TripActions platform, there may be closer alignment between the services in the future, according to Macleod.
"We're getting customer feedback to determine the use cases where we can deliver more value jointly," Macleod said.
Teampay is the latest virtual card provider to ally with TripActions, which previously inked partnerships with corporate payment startups Divvy and Spendesk.
TripActions earlier this month landed an investment from Lufthansa Group to close a Series D funding round at a $4 billion valuation, and the travel management provider hasn't been shy in touting its plans to scale up to serve larger corporate and enterprise-level clients.
(Clarification, Jan. 31: A previous version of this story indicated that Teampay offered virtual cards issued by Silicon Valley Bank and branded by Mastercard, however, the company offers cards from multiple issuers and payment networks.)