American Express and Maritz Travel today announced an alliance through which the companies will share resources to jointly develop and market a single strategic meetings management solution. Officials from the companies today said they expect to execute the final agreement in the coming weeks and bring the offering down to the client level by Sept. 1.
Officials said the American Express and Maritz would share resources, combine product sets, shift employees and jointly develop and integrate technologies to offer the market a single "end-to-end" meetings management offering for companies seeking to centralize sourcing, meeting planning and data analysis. The companies said they initially would focus the joint initiative, dubbed Maxvantage, on the North American market.
President and CEO of Maritz Travel Christine Duffy said American Express will "be taking on sales and marketing for strategic meetings management, and Maritz is going to be providing the operation management and technology platform and supplier relations."
American Express Business Travel vice president and general manager of Global Business Partnerships, Advisory Services and Corporate Meetings Solutions Hervé Sedky said the end result is "one strategic meetings management solution for the marketplace that both companies will be offering and supporting." Sedky said American Express will be "combining our assets, experiences and financial resources with Maritz to offer superior offerings in the marketplace."
American Express and Maritz in 1999 initiated a strategic customer referral alliance that was terminated in early 2002, as both companies at the time sought to focus on their core competencies in a down economy
(BTNonline, March 25, 2002). Duffy said the new agreement "goes well beyond what Maritz and America Express had introduced in the late '90s. Maybe that was actually a little ahead of its time. This is the right thing at the right time and it goes well beyond the marketing alliance."
Sedky noted the companies have already been engaged "in a very successful 12-plus year joint venture on the payment side of our business, so we've worked with Maritz for many years and enjoyed a great relationship."
"Both companies, American Express and Maritz, individually have a number of products and services that are in support of the Maxvantage alliance," Sedky said. "From an Amex perspective, clearly our meetings card program and partnership with StarCite for Meetings 360, but also meetings technology that we've developed. Maritz equally has a number of solutions that we're excited to introduce to our customers. These will all be part of this one-stop shop for strategic meetings management, but they're not necessarily in the alliance per se."
Neither American Express nor Maritz would disclose the terms of the deal, but Sedky said, "We're looking to both gain from the growth of this alliance, from a revenue and an earnings perspective."
Duffy noted the time is ripe for companies to adopt a strategic meetings management program, noting economic factors and growing scrutiny over corporate meetings expenses, which are spurring an expansion of strategic meetings management beyond its pharmaceutical industry roots. Sedky said, "Companies are looking for total transparency for their meetings spend. They're also looking for leadership in this space and expertise in this space. That's effectively what we've created. The meetings business is a $124 billion global business. Right now less than 10 percent of companies have truly managed that expense category. Therefore, we see this as a huge opportunity for us."
Sedky said the companies are "targeting Sept. 1" to begin bringing the Maxvantage offering to clients. "We both have our respective strategic meetings management customer base, and they'll be migrating into Maxvantage," Sedky said. "From the beginning, there will be enough scale to really get us started to continue to invest in this and scale up."
In the meantime, Sedky said some American Express employees would shift to Maritz, and vice versa, to support the alliance's division of labor. "We have a number of employees, all of our operational resources, that will become employees of Maritz, and equally we have employees of Maritz—those who provide some of the functional areas that Amex will take a lead responsibility for like sales and marketing—that will be re-badged to American Express," Sedky said.
Still, Sedky noted, "At the end of the day, who pays directly for the payroll is not the interesting part. What's interesting is the fact that we're both contributing resources, we're both accountable to the outcome and were both in this together. This is the Maritz SMM offer and American Express SMM offer, and we're going to manage this business in that fashion."