Can Fintech-Driven Spend Management Cos. Rewire Managed Travel?

The architecture of managed travel has familiar building blocks: the travel management company, the online booking tool, the corporate card and the expense system. Spend management companies are beginning to challenge that structure by embedding booking, payment and policy controls into platforms that promise both more traveler flexibility and better organizational oversight. Can they shift the center of gravity from the booking tool and TMC to the spend layer?

They definitely are trying.

What's a Spend Management Platform Anyway?

The newer crop of spend management players are coming from the world of fintech. Names like Brex (which Capital One in April acquired), Emburse, Mesh and Ramp are bringing travel management into competitive focus as one segment of comprehensive enterprise spend that long has been challenging for travel pros—and finance executives—to manage.

"Finance teams see travel and expense as a large portion of their company spending," said Ramp senior director of product management Calvin Lee. "These large cost centers are also places where there's often room for optimization, tighter controls and having a sharp policy to help govern spend." He added that finance teams find it incredibly time-consuming not just to administer travel and expense policy but also to wade through the end-of-month financial processes behind it.

In general, fintech-driven spend management companies are looking to automate spending category governance via top-of-funnel requests through payment and expense reporting approvals, then all the way through accounting reconciliation. They do so via a number of methods, but one commonly deployed mechanism is the form of payment itself—often in the form of a specialized card product that works in a mobile wallet and has spending policies "baked in" with fences around certain types of expenditures or merchants. While the payment mechanism only rarely puts a hard stop on charges, it can register "out of policy" purchases in real time to alert the user and flag the charge for the expensing process.

With rules engines and AI processes configured throughout the spending, reporting and reconciliation process, it becomes easier to manage multiple categories through "exception management"—and that definitely includes travel.

Dentsply Sirona global travel program lead Katie Williams has been eyeing the growing group of spend management providers for a while. She's not a client—and her current setup at Dentsply is a traditional TMC-OBT-expense integration—but she's intrigued by the fintech offerings.

"I'm very interested in the idea of implementing expense management at the point of purchase," Williams told BTN. "If we could limit the amount of active approvals taking place, because the spend is already approved … those don't ever land on an expense report. They don't ever see a manager because they're compliant, and they move on."

IT firm Veeam Software senior manager of travel and expense Sean Parham also does not use a spend management platform, but he did in his previous role at tech firm Discord, which had a much smaller travel program.

"At Discord, we thought, 'We'll do this for like three months and see what happens,' " he said about implementing just the payment vehicle in 2023. After six months, the company brought on the expense management piece, and travelers were so pleased with it that Parham ended up integrating his booking tool, Spotnana. (Spotnana also was Discord's TMC, before transitioning to a tech-only offering.)

"We wanted to make that work, and the credit goes to Ramp for making that happen," Parham said. "They did all the API heavy lifting, and ultimately the card was picking up the feed from Spotnana from a travel perspective—it was all feeding right in. We got no pushback from users."

What's in Play for Travel?

All the spend management companies identified in this report have TMC and booking tool partners and will invite a bring-your-own partner strategy, if travel managers need to start there. But the starting point may not be the endgame because Brex, Emburse, Mesh and Ramp each have beefed up their travel offerings in the last year. And they all claim to have courted ever larger and more globally oriented clients into their portfolios.

Capital One, after a string of rumors that it was acquiring wholesale the AI-powered travel pricing predictor and booking app Hopper, instead went with a minimalist approach, buying out a team of the app's technologists and bringing them in house as a travel tech development team. It then acquired Brex, suggesting end-to-end ambitions that could include a travel play.

Emburse entered the travel space in 2021 with a partnership with Travelperk (now simply Perk). It acquired Tripbam in 2023 and introduced travel booking tools in July 2025, at which point it also unified its branding across its travel functions to Emburse Book, Emburse Reshop and Emburse Audit. It also has TMC partnerships with the likes of CTM, Direct Travel and Egencia and most recently with specialist small and midsize travel management booking and service provider Corporate Traveler.

Likewise, Mesh offers its own travel booking tools, plus it has established partnerships with numerous TMC and travel technology companies—Altour, Gant, Navan and Spotnana, to name a few. The company encourages clients to BYO travel partners to its orchestration environment.

Each of these platforms also offers payment mechanisms as an integral piece of the spend management proposition. More on that later.

Ramp, which has offered its own travel booking tool since 2022 and has made a number of partner integrations since, amped up its travel credentials in March when it acquired business guest travel specialist Juno. A source close to Ramp told BTN the company is looking to launch a new corporate travel tool with this added tech horsepower, but Juno co-CEO Sam Felsenthal and Ramp senior director of product management Calvin Lee last week would not confirm to BTN that hot tip. "We're working on a lot of things. We're 88 days post-acquisition, so there's a lot of exploring," said Felsenthal.

Traditional Integrations Still Lack Control

"I actually have a meeting coming up … with our financial planning and accounting team because they always struggle with [the idea that,] here's the TMC data and then here is our expense data and here's our card data—how come they don't match up?"  said Parham.

He is talking about the several travel, payment and expense integrations the industry has seen over last two decades that have purported to link corporate travel booking and expense or corporate card data and expense, but rarely if ever linking the three in a truly rationalized ecosystem. In Parham's opinion, travel and card companies—in particular American Express Global Business Travel and American Express—have had years to work together on this issue, but the results haven't been there.

"You've got GBT over here and you have Amex card here. … And, yes, they had this partnership, but Amex card never really went to that next level when it came to the data. They had the opportunity and even the perfect setup. They could have gone all the way, but they didn't."

That's one of the primary junctures spend management companies are trying to bridge for travel with new kinds of products and platforms. Plus, said Mesh CEO Oded Zehavi, it's not a given that a company will have implemented this kind of data consolidation in the first place.

"You will be surprised how few companies have enabled these data feeds because it was complicated and it was expensive," Zehavi said. "Even when they do, the data comes 48 hours, on average, after the transaction happens. So… you cannot enable an experience where the employee leaves a business dinner and everything is already done. You need to wait. There has been some progress, but there are still problems.”

Navan has offered some of that progress. The startup unicorn that went public in December began in the travel management sphere, but even from the beginning was infamous for courting finance managers above travel managers in the small and midsize space. The company leaned into that finance piece when it acquired Liquid in 2020 to bring a payment card with expense management capability together with travel under one roof. It ultimately unified the brand portfolio in 2023 with Navan Travel and Navan Expense and rode that thesis to its initial public offering. More recently, Amex GBT and Concur have partnered up for "Complete"—what they characterize as a super-tight new partnership that will drive data flows via AI  to rationalize the end-to-end process.

For supporters of the all-in-one travel-to-expense option, however, Zehavi pointed out that compliance levels for booking within a closed system haven't necessarily gotten better—and, as every travel manager knows, that has to do with content availability.

"It's not enough to discuss visibility and control within the context of an OBT or TMC. More and more companies identify now … that 30 percent to 50 percent of bookings are happening outside of whatever system was brought in as a gatekeeper," he said. "That's because two things are becoming more challenging for finance organizations to handle. First, travelers will ask, 'Why can't I book the flight outside the OBT, if I see a better flight?' and even worse, 'Why should I pay more for a flight when I see something cheaper?' These are very hard for finance people to justify, and I see more companies allowing their employees to do it."

The Cliff of Unmanaging Travel?

More than adecade ago the idea of "open booking"—the idea of allowing travelers to book directly on supplier websites—stunned the managed travel industry. How would discounts be applied? How would data be collected for negotiating purposes? How would we know where travelers are so the TMC can provide support and services?

The remedy to that has been to push booking channel compliance. And, according to Thayer Investment Partners venture partner Cara Whitehill, who previously has worked for Deem, Sabre and Traxo, that hasn't really worked out.

"Going back to my Traxo days, leakage has been an issue for … even when I was at Deem in 2010, I was brought on to consumerize the product," she said. "We've been trying to solve this all this time, and it's not budged a bit. That should tell you something. Travelers are going to book where they want, and with AI it's even easier with [Large Language Models,] and they are going to find what they are looking for without ever even having to engage with their corporate booking tool or whatever."

A spend management platform provider might underscore that this is when spending policy and payment processes come into play and how they interact with travel policy and booking. But what if travelers won't comply to the payment product—or perhaps it's not accepted?

Williams said the promise of an expense report-free journey can lure travelers inside an end-to-end system. "It incentivizes people; if they do it the 'right' way, there's no expense report—easy, easy, peasy."

Zehavi, however, acknowledged travelers might still use their own cards, but if they bring them to the orchestration table, the data will still be captured in the spend management process. Additionally, he said, not every program has a global standard, so variations within a single program are very common where one payment vehicle or one TMC partner cannot cover a diverse program.

"We have TMC partnerships and integration with CTM, FCM, Altour Connect and now with Spotnana and Talma Group. We even have an integration with Navan and TravelPro. We see different behavior in different regions, and many of our customers are global, so they might use Navan in the U.S. but want to use a different method in one domestic market. That's OK. There are regions where people prefer to do an offline interaction. We can orchestrate that. But even if the employee is booking by himself with the card or without the card directly on United or booking.com, we can curate that data into a single trip object."

Ramp has taken a similar approach in terms of accumulating partners and having open architecture for integrations. Its acquisition of the TMC-friendly guest travel pros at Juno, who will continue to operate as Juno and broker those TMC partnerships, looks like a smart path to forge relationships with some big agencies like BCD Travel that weren't previously in their portfolio. Felsenthal told BTN that Ramp was not looking to edge out TMCs.

"When we think about serving an upmarket team, in general, we think about doing so in a very friendly way with the market," he said. "That's how we feel like it will work. But how that takes shape isn't completely finalized yet."

Thinking toward an almost inevitable future, Zehavi like Whitehill noted that more travelers will use AI for trip planning and perhaps never land on a corporate booking tool. He said payment and expense needs to be built to handle that.

I'm Sold! Hmmm… Not So Fast

Some industry observers are convinced that spend management platforms are the wave of the future for travel management with such tight data-driven narratives and what looks like a willingness, at least for now, to play nice with the large web of other players in the market.

There could be a fly in the ointment for some excited travel program managers—especially those who want to explore a snug all-in-one spend management system but are managing larger programs and have deeper banking and treasury relationships that could be imperiled by big changes like corporate card spend leaving the fold.

"I've heard of companies trying to make corporate card changes, and the treasury head saying no because their lending banks threatened to reduce their lending facility," said Williams. "In the startup space, these systems are perfect … But for a Fortune 500 company to take what they're doing and move it to one of these fintech platforms—that's monumental because there's potential to disrupt other treasury concerns."

Parham agreed. "We moved to Ramp in a rush because it was 2023 and Discord had been a client of Silicon Valley Bank, which went under. It was great timing for us; we were a small company and it really worked out."

The bring-your-own card strategy could put a doable spin on the option, but it brings a non-native configuration that buyers would want to interrogate before taking the leap. On that note, also, those who do opt for the native payment capability should be prepared for their suppliers to pay a premium to accept it—and that may not be favorable for the overall travel program. 

One platform—Brex—stands out for Williams because it was recently acquired by a more traditional financial institution: Capital One.

"The fact that Brex is now a fintech owned by a bank—that's interesting because that is what's going to disrupt the industry, in my opinion. You can't change your banking and lending relationships to fintech companies, but you could conceivably change them to Capital One. That feels like a game changer."

But all the fintech players say that interest is rising from programs of all sizes—even though most providers when asked will acknowledge that the small and midsize segment remains the most active.

At the end of the day, Ramp's Lee summed up what sounds like a good mantra for all the spend management providers, from Brex and Emburse to Mesh and Ramp: "Whether it's a traveler or someone in finance, we want to get them out of the software, and take them out of the workflow. Whether you do that through AI and automation or if you do that through an amazing partnership-driven or servicing experience, we want to make sure there's as little friction, as few touches as possible, in the whole experience.