TripActions will bring expense management and payment products under one roof, adding in-house expense management functionality to its Liquid payment card in the US. The integrated system will be available in Europe from the end of this year or early next, the company said.
First launched in February, the Liquid platform features physical and virtual Visa-branded credit cards that can be used to book travel via TripActions' and other booking tools, and to make in-trip payment at brick-and-mortar merchants, such as restaurants, with managers able to set trip budgets and other spending parameters. Previously, approved purchases made via Liquid were sent to whichever third-party expense management system the client company used. Now, the entire process can be completed within the Liquid platform, which has added "full expense management capability" according to TripActions.
"The innovation we've built out over the past several months is the ability to completely replace your expense management system," said Michael Sindicich, general manager, TripActions Liquid.
Combining a payment tool with expense management and reporting functions within Liquid helps give companies clearer visibility into corporate spending that is becoming more distributed across a given organisation—with employees increasingly making a wider range of purchasing decisions, including travel booking, software as a service subscriptions, advertising and other expenses, according to Sindicich. Already a rising trend, such decentralised spending patterns have been "vastly accelerated" by the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant rise of the work-from-home ecosystem, which has given workers more purchasing autonomy, he noted.
Legacy infrastructure, which often takes the form of a patchwork of different corporate cards, P-cards, procurement systems and expense management tools, is ill-suited to serve this modern corporate spending paradigm, and "really burdens," employees, managers and accounting teams, Sindicich said.
But while Covid has in many ways increased the value proposition of an all-in-one payment and expense system, the plan to add expense functionality was in the works before the pandemic took hold, according to Sindicich, who said that TripActions clients long had requested that the company add in-house expense management functionality.
"Nothing on our roadmap got edited [by Covid]; it got accelerated," Sindicich said—adding that the ability for companies to implement quickly and enforce Covid-related spending restrictions—such as not allowing lunches to be expensed for work-from-home employees—necessitates a payment tool that is directly linked to policy management and expense reporting.
"Unless you're controlling [spend] through the payment method, you don't get that visibility in real time; you have to wait until the employees submit those expenses weeks or months later," Sindicich said of unapproved expenses.
TripActions, which recently rolled out a new enterprise version of its platform for larger clients, is not shy about its plans to challenge the dominance of corporate card providers such as American Express, and expense management providers like Concur in that segment.
"We actually see this as mostly for the enterprise and midmarket segment," Sindicich said of Liquid, noting that the company already counts several Fortune 500 companies, along with major midmarket firms like Lyft and Zoom, among clients using the platform. "So this ties in well with our enterprise strategy."
Additional reporting by Mark Frary