The global leader in the travel-and-expense management clubhouse for revenue has a new president, Mike Eberhard. While Steve Singh remains chief executive of Concur, Eberhard will be next in seniority.
About 44 million people use Concur to process travel and expenses, up from 32 million users in 2015, says Eberhard, who plans to grow that number further.
He says the company is "growing in every region and in all customer segments from small to large".
He is new to the role but has been with Concur for 13 years, leading customer operations, sales, and business development partnerships. He spent some of those years building out the company's Asia-Pacific business. Then he came back and took over its global distribution operations just after the business's acquisition by SAP.
Tnooz asked what his top goals are for the company. He said,
"I don’t think there is a marquee company in T&E that is embracing the trend of making corporate tool consumer-grade as much as we are....
"Yet when you look some of the more ecommerce companies around Asia, you see tremendous innovation happening that the travel industry could learn from. The field is wide open to applying those innovations to corporate expense-management tools...."
"We're a customer-first company, so our goal is that we want to have consumer-grade ease in corporate tools."
This is a significant challenge, he says, because many pure-play consumer tools have spent a lot more time and money on developing user experiences that are appealing on mobile devices.
Concur needs to innovate further, he says, because corporate travelers are tempted by multiple options to spend money outside of preferred channels.
A second priority for Eberhard is to expand Concur's open platform and its set of open APIs for workable solutions for "things like tax reclaim, fraud analysis or all the way down to specific market-level functionality, such as country-specific services."
A third focus is global expansion. "One of our fastest-growing segments is small- to mid-size businesses, and we want to keep that pace up worldwide."
One of the biggest challenge Concur faces, he says, is in adapting itself to the differing needs and expectations of clients of various sizes, needs, and locations.
"Some customers want to leverage metasearch, some want to bring personalization to the booking process (rather than having to repeat entering traveler preferences, for instance, they want to get recommendations based on what a traveler's associates have booked previously), and some want other new components, like persona-based dashboards."
In September, Concur acquired Hipmunk, the travel metasearch brand. On the related note of investment and acquisition, Eberhard tells Tnooz that the status of Concur's Perfect Trip Fund is that "it exists with the investments made up until this point, many of which are doing really well."
The fund is now "managed within SAP", but Eberhard says Concur continues to have opportunities to look at "earlier stage companies" for possible additions to "its ecosystem", which is built around its software to book flights and submit or approve expenses.