U.S. Bank debuted its own expense reporting tool for midsize companies this month as a bevy of other expense providers partnered with banks, online booking or technology providers to expand their distribution.
U.S. Bank Expense Management is designed to be simple for both employees and administrators to use, but is available in 15 languages to support global deployments, according to senior vice president Jeffrey Rankin.
Citing various studies that have indicated the substantial savings afforded by automated expense reporting, Rankin asked: "Why aren't all companies using such applications?
"If you talk about the Fortune500, most everyone is," Rankin continued. "But midsize companies, with annual revenues of $25 million to $500 million, still use manual, paper-based or spreadsheet expense reporting systems. It's not because they prefer it." Many simply can't afford the cost or time to select, implement and manage electronic systems designed for larger corporations, he said.
While designed to be simple, the expense tool offers approval workflows and multiple layers of approvals among a robust set of features, Rankin said.
The bank "partnered with several other companies, including Visa to develop this and we're tying it into our own self-developed, Web-based online access tool, so we've customized it," Rankin said.
About a dozen customers were either "using or implementing the tool" as of this month. Some have been testing it since the spring, he said. Bank officials were finalizing pricing, but Rankin said the plan is to include the expense tool in an overall payment proposal for new clients.
"While we targeted the middle market, some of our larger customers have asked" about the tool, Rankin said. U.S. Bank for several years partnered with Concur, but that relationship ended when American Express Corporate Card signed an exclusive agreement with and invested in Concur, said Rankin.
The electronic expense tool is "saving our customers money every single day," according to U.S. Bank Corporate Payment Systems president Robert Abele.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch showed its own card management and expense reporting tool called Works during the National Business Travel Association show. Purchased from an Austin, Texas-based technology company in 2005, Bank of America has been enhancing and globalizing the online tool to meet customer needs, according to Jennifer Petty, senior vice president and card product executive. Receipt imaging capabilities are the latest focus. Works is offered in North America, Asia and Europe with plans to expand to Latin America early next year.
Meanwhile, third-party developers announced distribution or integration partnerships. BMO announced plans to integrate card data from both its BMO and Diners Club brands, both of which run on the MasterCard network, into IBM's Global Expense Reporting Solution. The partnership also offers BMO clients preferred pricing for IBM's GERS. BMO last year partnered with both expense vendor CyberShift and data consolidator TravelMaster to integrate its card offering to the expense and data products.
IBM's Managed Business Process division, which includes expense, also partnered with Rearden Commerce to integrate booked and expensed data. Rearden owns ExpenseWire, now marketed as Rearden Expense, but also has partnerships. "Rearden believes it is important to provide the market with choice, and the ability to find best of breed solutions," said Rearden vice president of travel Tony D'Astolfo.
Expense vendor DataBasics and Cornerstone Information Systems announced integration of expense data into Cornerstone's iBank data reporting platform. The duo partnered to help "customers with multiple travel providers" capture and consolidate data, company officials said. Cornerstone said its iBank platform houses data from more than 80,000 corporations.
CyberShift announced that is now offers clients outsourced services for audits, payment, receipt handling and both end-user and system administration support to enter policy or hierarchy changes into the Web-based application. CyberShift earlier announced various partnerships with nuTravel, BMO and Diners, MasterCard and Travel GPA.
Travelocity Business said it partnered with Certify to integrate booking and expense data for small and medium-size businesses. Founded in 2008, Certify captures receipts via smartphone camera, email, text, fax, scan and other image uploads.
ExpenseWatch.com last year also announced integration partnerships with Egencia and Travelocity Business, and this month said it would partner with TripIt for future booking integration. About 20 customers are using the Egencia integration that ExpenseWatch.com coded to pull in itineraries to the expense tool, said ExpenseWatch.com president and CEO Bill Vergantino. Smaller companies often use a variety of booking tools and some don't mandate usage of just one, he said to explain the new thinking on building and maintaining booking integrations.
ExpenseWatch targets corporations with fewer than 1,000 employees, but half of its business is comprised of companies with fewer than 50 employees.
By year-end, Vergantino said, ExpenseWatch.com would release functionality that allows customers to use a drop-down module to import and export data into their human resources, accounting or even booking systems.