GBT Invests in SME-Oriented Leadership: Here’s the Vision

Amex GBT’s Becky Power talks…

• Taking on a leadership role in travel
• Pursuing the hot SME client base in an increasingly competitive market
• The objective of artificial intelligence for an SME travel program
• The skill sets needed to connect with SME buyers

Becky Power is American Express Global Business Travel’s new VP for global client management for Select and Ovation, SME. She sat down with BTN Group VP of content Elizabeth West at the tail end of the Global Business Travel Association convention in Denver. Power talked about the new role at GBT, how she has approached her leadership role in travel and how her previous tech-centered positions at Google and Accenture inform her vision of what the SME travel program should be and why SMEs should be managing travel in the first place. Below is an excerpted and edited transcript. 

Business Travel News: You have a new job—and it’s an entirely new role at American Express Global Business Travel. Tell us about that.

Becky Power: I may have the longest job title in the world. I'm vice president for global client management for Select and Ovation, SME. For context, [American Express Global Business Travel has three product solutions: Egencia, Select and Ovation. I'm overseeing all of the client management for both Select and Ovation. Essentially that involves working with the clients … to implement those products. Then, when they have those products implemented, helping them to get the very best of the GBT marketplace and solution to help them grow their businesses and just have seamless travel experiences.

BTN: You have a long background with Google and a few years at a large consulting firm before that. How did you land with GBT and what is exciting you most about the new role?

Power: For me, it's always been about how technology helps businesses achieve their goals and help them grow. I worked with some of their largest brands in travel and retail, helping them get the best out of Google's products when it came to digital marketing cloud or devices. There were two reasons really why I was really excited about joining the GBT team in this moment. The first one was I really loved the travel industry. The second is that Amex GBT has a really unique recipe when it comes to excellence in service and then really strong software and product solutions. And when I thought about what I could bring to the table coming from that technology background—in this moment where technology and AI that is evolving so quickly—I wanted to participate in that journey.

BTN: Egencia product for SME is well known, and many people understand Ovation’s reputation and specialization in high-touch law firms and often private equity and other firms like that. Tell me more about Select for SME.

Power: Select gives SME clients the ability to plug and play and mix and match what they need. So the marketplace is the GBT marketplace. So the content is the content that GBT provides. And then when they think about their booking tool, they actually have choice. They could use GBT’s booking tool, which is called Neo, or they could use a proprietary booking tool like Concur. There are lots of other ‘local’ ones. But Select gives clients the ability to plug and play both the content that we provide from a marketplace experience with their booking tool, with their expense tool. While you have Ovation and a Egencia, which you could say are both “package solutions,” Select offers a more plug-and-play design.

BTN: Tell me about the opportunity Amex GBT is seeing in the SME market. To bring on someone like you is an investment in that market, so what’s the green field that you are working toward?

Power: When you look at the SME pie, I think it was a [Global Business Travel Association] stat that said there was $1.4 trillion in global business travel spend overall, and about 950 billion of that was from SMEs. So first of all, it's an enormous amount of opportunity, an enormous amount of people booking travel within that segment. But only about 20 percent of that is managed, so there’s a huge amount that is unmanaged.

[Travelers at these companies are] probably booking through whatever platform they want. It's probably very hard to get a full picture of what's happening with their spend, how they think about their travel policies. So when I go back to [what I mentioned earlier about] how technology helps businesses grow, that’s the thing I find really exciting. Especially when you've got macroeconomic conditions—and SMEs are not immune to them—we tend to be see companies really focusing on how to drive top line growth, but also how do we think about our bottom line as well?

That bottom line can be things like how do you make sure your employees are as efficient as possible? If you've got a central marketplace tool that they're booking through as opposed to searching on various different websites, you're driving an efficiency gain there. It can also be the content and the discounts that are available to them. About 40 percent of our SMEs on average are tapping into GBT’s discounted rates. There's immediate savings there. One of the things we [report] on a regular basis is the value of the savings that our SME clients have realized through the program, which in this environment, is incredibly important to them. … I can understand the pressure they're under in terms of understanding their spend, driving strategic decisions on how they manage their travel programs, driving efficiencies with their users, understanding where they are and really being able to bring the magic of GBT’s best-in-class products and also the services to be able to help them.

BTN: SME business looks more profitable for TMCs. GBT has delineated this in its earnings calls: SMEs don’t often have their own negotiated rates, so they use the GBT Marketplace. They don’t necessarily have the volume to negotiate for TMC services either. As such, there’s lots of competition for SME business, but SMEs have told BTN they are nervous that they are going to get pushed to all automated, digital solutions and won’t be able to access program customization or great account management support.

Power: First, if that competition for the SME market wasn’t happening, I’d be a bit worried as to whether GBT was pursuing the right questions. So the competition itself is kind of comforting in some ways.

Second, though, SMEs behave in a really big range. Some might have tech at the heart of their business and that may be how they want to interact with a TMC primarily online. But that’s not always the case. Often within SMEs there are different portfolios of travelers with different needs. Some with very complex, multidestination trips that require changes on a regular basis. Others, are much more straightforward. Some need best-in-class content for rail service or data about sustainability. The numbers are vast and theirs a lot of variability in there. So the GBT proposition for that market is really interesting because we do have the breadth of Egencia being a very strong digital proposition and Select has a particularly strong travel specialist community. We been very deliberate about building out the range of how SMEs may want to work with GBT. And we listen.

BTN: But you do have this deep technological background with Google and retailing. Where is that going to be applied to the SME corporate travel process?

Power: If you think not just about GBT, but many of the providers out there, you're starting to work with agents or bots for query answering. People who book business travel are the same consumers that shop on the weekends and book their own personal travel. In that consumer behavior, people are looking for more personalization and more recommendations. When you think about how you add technology into [business travel processes], it can be to align with those consumer preferences and trends. We want to provide recommendations in corporate travel tools based on what you've previously traveled. Or, when you're working with travel agents, technology should support them in being effective and efficient by prioritizing and stack ranking what they should be working on. I'm not sure anyone knows what the end point is, honestly. It’s a journey right now, and I’m excited not just to build platforms for now but for two or three years from now. What we need to be building towards, however, is not not full tech automation. It's personalization, it's great range of content, it's a simple efficient process.

BTN: How is GBT reaching out to the SME market now and how is the ‘pitch’ different to SMEs than it is with large enterprises?

Power: It's not necessarily the same conversation that someone would have with a very large enterprise client. You are looking at what are the types of businesses, the types of travel behavior that they have that tend to get the most value out of the program, and also what their growth moments are and what's driving them to want to have a travel program. For many, actually, it's the ability to understand the data and what's happening with their travelers. And honestly, it’s a real moment of joy when the program is live and you can sit down and have a strategic conversation with the travel manager: the individuals traveling, what they are spending and other data insights. They are suddenly in the position to have strategic conversations with the business around what do we do about our travel program? Where are we investing more? What should we doing if we're going to expand into a country and what does this mean for us? There's obviously more of an education element with an unmanaged business than with a large enterprise. Obviously, one conversation is more of a ‘why GBT versus someone else?’ And the other conversation often is, ‘why manage travel at all?’

BTN: How are your structuring and possibly training the sales team to go after that business and connect with potential SME customers?

Power: A lot of people are used to talking to travel managers or procurement people when it comes to engaging with a potential customer. But these roles don't necessarily exist in small businesses and their level of awareness around travel is very different.

I think teaching people to be able to go and have those conversations with people that quite frankly might be a finance director or a CFO or it's business development or even maybe a CEO or it could be HR. Really, it could be anybody. And to that degree, the language you have to use and how you explain the program needs to be different. One of the things I’ve done in the past—and it really goes back to putting yourself in someone else’s shoes—you have to help them have enough knowledge and awareness of what that CFO or HR executive is thinking about on a daily basis. How do you get to the right level with them and use language and metrics that connect with them. What data do they look at? What’s their mindset for their small business? Often, in a business like this, the knowledge runs deep but we also need to diversify and broaden our language and knowledge so we can adapt to all the different types of people in roles that would have reasons to manage a travel program.