In yet another example of how competitive the spend management space has become, Brex announced today that it has expanded into travel.
As well as trying to take market share from incumbents like Concur, Brex is also taking on start-ups like Navan (previously called TripActions) – which started its business with a focus on travel expense management before broaden its offering — and also Ramp, himself extended to travel last year.
In an interview with businesskinda.com, co-CEO and co-founder Henrique Dubugras said Brex Empower users can now book travel in the Brex mobile app. The company says it worked on the product for over a year and was in private beta for several months before it became available to the public this week. Despite the different players in the space, he said Concur and Navan are Brex Travel’s main competitors.
Part of the purpose of the new offering is to apply to travel expenses the budgeting capabilities that Empower has, Dubugras said.
“Sometimes companies have a perception that the best way to reduce travel costs is to get people to take cheaper flights or cheaper hotels and make two stops on their way to two places,” he said. “We believe the best way to actually manage it is to make sure that some trips don’t happen at all.”
For example, finance teams can see information — such as the fact that a company has a $100,000 T&E budget — and spend on company cards in real time, then decide which trips to prioritize, Dubugras said.
The new travel feature also automatically provides receipts, so an employee doesn’t have to say, check out of a hotel and then upload the receipt. It also does business like letting an employee know if something is out of policy and needs additional approval. And if a company requests it, employees can only see flight and hotel options that are in the policy.
Image Credits: Brex
Brex chose not to accept commissions from airlines or hotels that wouldn’t offer more expensive flights or hotels as an alternative, Dubugras said.
“Some companies are paid not to show those because they know corporate buyers are less price sensitive,” he added. “But we think that will only reduce confidence in the system. And because travel isn’t our core business, we decided not to take that money and basically have a completely unbiased inventory and show all flights and all available hotels.”
Brex generates revenue from the new offering by charging a per-ride fee, which can vary from company to company depending on travel volume.
Another feature designed to simplify travel booking is that employees can book flights to another country and within a country at the same time. Usually the two bookings must be made separately. The app also aims to make it easier to help employees who work in different countries travel domestically and pay for travel in different currencies, he added.
Particularly in building out its new Travel offering, Brex partnered with a company called Spotnana and is essentially white-labeling its “travel-as-a-service” software, which provides a back-end infrastructure that integrates with global airlines and hotels.
“I think of it as a kind of ‘Stripe for travel’,” said Dubugras.
Brex says it has integrated Spotnana’s travel-related capabilities with its mobile app, card and expense management capabilities to support travel policies, traveler profiles and workflows for bookings and reporting. The company says it’s built “a lot of customization” on top of Spotnana — such as travelers’ travel details, in an effort “to make spending simple and seamless.” In addition, Spotnana Brex’s inventory search API helps to provide users with a travel budget estimate.
From a technology perspective, the company says it chose Spotnana for its microservices-based architecture, open APIs, “rich” travel content, extensible data infrastructure, and extensive library of white-label UI components.
Brex has announced its spend management product, Authorizein April 2022. According to Brex, companies in more than 120 countries, such as DoorDash, Coinbase, Indeed, Superhuman, SeatGeek, Built Technologies and Scale AI, are users of the product. Travel customers on Empower include GoGuardian, Miso Robotics, FMX, Satellite Healthcare, and more.
The company said it has also begun migrating all card customers to Empower.
Startups are pushing to ease some of the pain of managing travel expenses. In February, Navan (formerly TripActions) claimed to be the first travel company to integrate OpenAI and ChatGPT APIs into its infrastructure and product suite. The company says it is currently using generative AI technology to write, test and fix code with the goal of increasing operational efficiency and reducing overhead. At the time, a spokesperson said program administrators can ask Navan’s virtual assistant Ava for reporting on the travel and spending programs, whether through text, graph, PDF, etc. She added: “We’re also using AI to do everything from eliminating expense reports to automating specification – and in the case of hotel folios, we collect these directly from the hotel after a stay, categorize line items, compare that to the company policy and submit it for the user, so there is no need for them [to] move pennies to balance a folio – a process that in my experience is quite painful.
When Ramp unveiled its own travel product last year, CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman told businesskinda.com it would be offered to all existing customers and new customers at no additional cost. Ramp said it planned to use AI-assisted software to “completely” automate companies’ expense reporting, doing things like collecting receipts automatically and categorizing all travel-related expenses. The company said the offering also highlights out-of-policy purchases and allows employees to book travel on whatever service they want.
Thirty-year-old Concur also has one travel specific offer which has features like Concur Request, which allows companies to “create a customizable pre-expense control document to identify anticipated expenses.”
Want more fintech news in your inbox? To register here.
Do you have a news tip or insider information about a topic we covered? We’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at maryann@businesskinda.com.com. Or you can send us a message at tips@businesskinda.com.com. Please respect anonymity requests.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.