The expense reporting sphere has seen a flurry of activity in recent weeks, with nearly every major tool supplier—including Concur, IBM, ExpenseWire, DataBasics, CyberShift's Necho and Ariba—reporting a new partnership, product enhancement or acquisition.
Dominant corporate card supplier American Express in late July placed its chips in the corner of Concur, which for the past two years has focused on integration with online booking tool Cliqbook after the acquisition of its owner, Outtask. American Express staked a 13 percent ownership claim in Concur, purchasing 6.4 million shares of newly issued common stock for $251 million. With American Express' investment, the two companies also have entered into an exclusive marketing alliance.
"For years, we've been growing our travel and expense business, and American Express has been the number-one corporate card provider," said Concur president and COO Raj Singh. "It's two businesses that have provided complementary solutions for years coming to a conclusion on how we can go to market together."
North of 50 percent of Concur clients use American Express corporate cards, Singh said. Even with the partnership, Concur will continue to integrate with other corporate card networks, and American Express still will provide data to other expense reporting tools.
In conjunction with the investment, American Express vice chairman Ed Gilligan also was appointed to Concur's board of directors.
One week earlier, Concur announced its latest version of analytics capabilities that allows clients to compare booked travel to the actual spending reported. Through integration of itineraries, corporate card spending, electronic receipts, cash expenses and contracted suppliers, expense managers can reconcile and analyze the data from both ends, according to Concur.
"To date, efforts to reconcile all this data have been costly and ineffective," said Singh. "Traditional agency and card analytics tools have struggled because they only capture a part of the spend."
The move was just one of many by suppliers to work toward end-to-end expense management. In a similar vein, IBM in early August announced an agreement for travel management company Tri-Pen Management Corp. to deliver IBM's Global Expense Reimbursement Solution to its clients, while IBM will host services for Tri-Pen's TravelMaster technology, a platform that integrates travel booking, corporate card and expense reporting data.
Expense reporting tool supplier ExpenseWire, meanwhile, has announced a series of partnerships to integrate its capabilities, following Rearden Commerce's acquisition of the company. TRX in late July announced that it has integrated ExpenseWire with its ResX online booking tool.
The partnership provides a counter to Concur's strategy, as expense managers can select various vendors for each level of expense data integration rather than a single solution. ResX previously partnered with other expense reporting suppliers, including DataBasics and, prior to its acquisition by Concur, Gelco Expense Management
(BTNonline, July 23, 2007). ExpenseWire also announced a partnership with Orbitz for Business, allowing for such benefits as credit card integration and integrated travel itineraries.
Meanwhile, ExpenseWire will operate as a subsidiary of Rearden, integrating with its Web-based Personal Assistant travel management tool. "There is enormous untapped market demand for expense management solutions which are easy to deploy, easy to use and integrate seamlessly with other applications," according to Rearden founder and CEO Patrick Grady. "ExpenseWire fills this need perfectly and is a logical addition to our open technology platform."
American Express is not the only issuer to make a move in the expense reporting realm. Toronto-based BMO Financial Group, which issues corporate payment products through subsidiary Harris N.A., in late July joined with Ariba to create a source-to-settle interface. "Ariba is a very well-positioned organization, that really fit what we want in the marketplace," said BMO Spend & Payment Solutions managing director Terry Wellesley.
Touted benefits include access to the 160,000 suppliers in Ariba's supplier network, automation of purchase orders and invoices and monitoring of contract creation and performance. The bank acting as a front-end aggregator allows for client customization of the interface, he said.
Necho and DataBasics, each of which ascribe to the partnership philosophy of end-to-end expense management, also recently enhanced their tools. DataBasics in July announced a budgeting add-on to its ExpenSite expense tool that calculates budget status via such dimensions as projects or employee type and integrates data streams including travel authorizations, booking data, card transactions and expense report data.
"Budgeting belongs inside the travel management process," according to DataBasics CEO Alan Tyson. "Whether you are managing individual travel or meetings, it's there that the spending decisions are made, and it's there that you need the control. After the fact, general ledger-based budgeting is simply not timely enough."
Following the launch of Necho's Mobile Edition last year
(BTNonline, Sept. 10, 2007), the company recently made available a new version that allows for mobile review and approval of expense reports. Managers can use such mobile devices as BlackBerry phones to handle expense report review remotely, including entering rejection reasons and comments into the reports.
Although approaches differ, Concur's Singh said all the recent activity, including American Express' buy-in, supports the end-to-end expense management philosophy. "The world's largest corporate card company just validated the strategy by saying this is the company they want to go to market with, and even competitors are now making acquisitions or announcing partnerships," Singh said. "The debate as to whether travel and expense is an integrated process is over."