Study: Travel Managers Hesitant To Adopt Mobile Payments

Electronic invoicing and mobile-payment options are just a small sampling of new trends designed to make doing business in the enterprise easier than ever.  And, finding an efficient way to streamline how businesses manage the travel spend of their employees seems like a logical and good idea. So why are some enterprises so hesitant to make the digital leap?

Recent research from the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) suggests that, while travel managers are aware of new payment technologies, such as mobile payments and contactless cards, they don’t really view enabling it for their business “customers” a priority. Instead, travel managers stated that their bigger pain point was trying to improve their organization’s expense management system. For example, being able to record or image receipts and being able to consolidate travel data to a single system were cited by travel managers as expense management tasks they were “very interested” or “interested in.”

The study provides crucial insight into how payment solutions work for both the business traveler and the travel manager, according to Joseph Bates, GBTA Foundation vice president of research.

“Currently, the expense-management side of business travel is a pain point for both groups providing an opportunity for payment solutions providers to meet these needs,” Bates said in a company statement.

Nearly all participating travel managers reported that their company uses a corporate card program and that it meets their business needs, with 70 percent of travel spend being paid through corporate cards, the survey found.

Corporate card use is not without its drawbacks, though. One-third of travel managers cited efficiency, merchant acceptance and global-spend visibility as areas in need of improvement.

So if organizations are willing to use corporate cards, why the hesitation on mobile payments? Travel managers, the study found, are more interested in software or mobile apps that can assist with expense management. Specifically, to travel managers deemed real-time travel updates as most attractive, followed by technology that aids with general expense-management tasks.

Innovation In The T&E World

Travel managers might be hesitant to proceed on some innovation trails, but some businesses would like to simplify the T&E process as much as possible. For example, SAP and Amadeus announced earlier this year that they were partnering together to integrate the SAP Cloud for Travel and Expense solution with Amadeus e-Travel Management.

Businesses want a well-rounded solution for their travel-management requirements, ideally through a single provider integrated with the rest of the company’s systems, an Amadeus executive reported.

The partnership will combine Amadeus’ booking technology and SAP’s Cloud Travel and Expense Solution. Going forward, Amadeus will have the ability to give organizations the option to manage travel management and meet business travellers’ expectations.

This innovation is important, especially as Forrester recently reported that T&E is among the most difficult categories to control. However, the research also found that 80 percent of surveyed financial managers are not using an automated tool for the process. Instead, employees are manually entering expenses, which the report’s authors said is a time-consuming process.

Additionally, this leads to companies not fully understanding their external travel spending, being unable to identify opportunities for negotiated discounts with vendors, or initiate supplier consolidation, the authors said.

With these factors in mind, it seems that travel managers would have several reasons to move forward in their payments options. The saying goes that “knowing is half the battle,” and apparently travel managers know that mobile payments are an option. So the question is, when will they be ready to integrate digital options?