Amex GBT, Concur partner for integrated travel and expense offering

SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) have partnered for a combined travel and expense offering that will be available to joint clients later this month, the companies announced.

The offering, dubbed Complete, is a combined effort of both companies that "will comprehensively integrate our technology, engineering capabilities and expense management solutions with GBT's robust software services and innovative marketplace platform," SAP Concur general manager and chief product officer Fred Fredericks said. "It is a co-developed, next-generation solution with AI at its core. It combines booking, servicing, payments and expensing into one experience."

Amex GBT has integrated its marketplace into the SAP Concur tech stack to be available in Complete, which Fredericks said will offer cost savings and incentives, and users will work across a single app and view with support from an integrated chat agent across the platform. Clients also will have a single team from Amex GBT and Concur for account management and support, according to the companies.

In addition, the partnership includes an integration of Concur Expense with Amex GBT's Egencia for a combined travel and expense platform.

"We have thousands of users who have just Concur Expense and might not want a super highly managed travel program," Fredericks said. "We'll be able to bring Egencia with all that content and the favorable economics and features into the Concur Expense ecosystem."

The new app, website and branding around Complete will be showcased at SAP's Connect event in Las Vegas next week, and customers later this month will have the ability to opt in. Amex GBT and Concur in November will begin moving joint customers—which Amex GBT chief product and strategy officer Evan Konwiser said is a "considerable" portfolio—to Complete, though Fredericks said customers do have the choice to opt out.

Concur Travel, of course, just three years ago started rolling out its new booking experience, referred to informally as T2, and has gradually been moving its customers to that platform as new features become available. The launch of Complete "is not cannibalizing our existing offering," Fredericks said, as the companies brought in additional staff to build out Complete. Concur Travel will continue to support and invest in the T2 platform, and other TMCs still will have the full ability to resell and service the platform, Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan said.

Similarly, Konwiser said Amex GBT would continue to support Neo, its proprietary booking tool built from its acquisition of KDS.

Sultan said T2 was "the beginning of the rapid evolution" and that during its rollout, the challenge of working across numerous TMCs was a "critical blocker" to a faster rollout, with the need to work across multiple systems and back offices and time spent planning, testing and certifying. That illustrated the need for an integrated solution, he said.

"To be able to move faster, we needed to do so with a partner who is engaged in the entire process from start to finish," Sultan said. "The approach we've taken for the last few years is not going to be fit for the next 10 years."

While Sultan said the movement of clients to Complete would begin with the geographies with the most mutual clients—the U.S. and U.K., particularly—he and Konwiser both said it would be a much quicker process than the movement from legacy Concur to T2. While it took some time to ensure all functionality in legacy Concur would be available to clients based on such factors as their geography or global distribution system, "there's nothing that the Complete offering is going to be lacking relative to new Concur Travel," Sultan said.

Konwiser said there also is a plan in place to move to Complete former CWT clients, who are now part of Amex GBT following the competition of its acquisition of CWT in September, which will be communicated to them.

Concur and Amex GBT have had various levels of joint working relationships for much of the past 20 years. In 2008—when Amex GBT still was a part of the larger American Express Co.—Amex took a 13 percent stake in Concur, and the two companies had an exclusive reselling agreement for their respective payment and expense offerings. That investment ended when SAP acquired Concur in 2014, but Amex GBT and Concur have maintained a reselling relationship since with the exception of a period when the contract lapsed following Amex GBT's KDS acquisition.

Now with the deeper integration, Amex GBT and Concur said they soon would publish a development roadmap for Complete, with features added regularly next year. One of the key advantages they are touting of the integration is the combined data within Amex GBT, Concur and more broadly SAP, which Konwiser said will enhance artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities as they develop further.

"We feel having the ecosystem as tightly together, frankly as one, is what's going to drive the future for the industry," he said. "We're building a future-proof solution with the right [user experience] that drives frictionless travel, has data flowing in a way that drives the right experiences and powers the AI tools of today and tomorrow."

*This article was originally published in BTN.