Video: Future-proof T&E: Top 10 Industry Trends You Need to Know Today | Duration: 3580s | Summary: Future-proof T&E: Top 10 Industry Trends You Need to Know Today

Transcript for "Future-proof T&E: Top 10 Industry Trends You Need to Know Today": Welcome to everyone who is joining. We have a lot of great content to cover today, so we'll start get started shortly. Hi, Marni, Steve, and Kevin. I'm very excited to see you guys here today. Should be a really great session. Hi, Dasha. Hi. Hi, Steve and Kevin. Hello, everyone joining. Hello. Hello. Alright. I see people joining. So why don't we get started? Welcome to our webinar, future proof t and e, the top five industry trends you need to know today. Thank you for joining us. My name is Dasha Skripchenko. I'm in the field marketing team here at Imbursed and your host for today's event. Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. This event is being recorded. You'll receive the link to the recording following the event. I want to point out the engagement area on your right. We encourage you to ask questions, which you can do so in the q and a tab. We included some helpful resources for you in the documents. Chat is also available today. So feel free to send us a message, engage with our speakers, and your fellow webinar attendees. This session is new, and we want you to get as much out of it as you can. Tell us where you're joining from, or what is the craziest thing you've seen show up on an expense report lately? Or if you have a magic wand, what would be the 1 balance expense challenge you would solve? Or if you just want, you can send us a gift. That's an option too. We want to keep the conversation going. Connect with our speakers on LinkedIn. If you are customers, start discussion in the inverse collective, our customer community. We wanna hear from you. You can also request a follow-up meeting, which you can do so by clicking the button on the top. For all of you who've been joining our CPA credit webinars this year, you know the drill. For all new participants, welcome. If you're interested in earning 1 CPE credit for attending and participating in today's webinar, you will need to attend the entire event, answer 3 poll questions, and then you can expect us to follow-up within 7 business days with your certificate. I am very excited to introduce our speakers. We truly have the best of the best here today. Marni Martin is our chief executive officer. Marni has more than 25 years of technology business leadership. She has a great track record working with both public and privately held software companies, driving teams that deliver incremental profitable growth, market expansion, and increased brand and analyst recognition. Steve Reynolds is our chief strategy officer. Steve is responsible for leading the company's initiative to integrate and innovate across end to end travel and expense. Steve is actually a 2024 inductee into Business Travel Hall of Fame. And in 2013 and 2015, Business Travel News named him one of the 25 most influential executives in business travel. And last but not least, Kevin Fermenter is the research director of financial applications at IDC. As the research director, Kevin provides insights and analysis across multiple Fintech market segments, including accounting, revenue management, accounts payables, accounts receivables, treasury, and much more. To learn more about our speakers and to connect with them on LinkedIn, simply visit the speakers tab at any point of the event. So, Marni, before I pass this off to you, I'm going to start us with a warm up poll question. Mhmm. Reminder, if you want to get CPE credit, you need to answer 3, 4 questions. I'm gonna open the question now. So all you have to do is just click on it. There is no submit button. So tell us, does your organization have any concerns about the employee team experience? We'll give everybody 30 seconds or so, to answer. Well, look at that. Looks like his responses are coming in. A lot of people do have concerns, which means Oh, yeah. The right place. So I think, this I mean, obviously, we're here to address the concerns and to help you prepare for what's next. So once we see the results slow down, I will pass this off to Marni to tell us not only why we're here, but how you can address those concerns as well. So looks like I think yes is, is the majority here, so I'm going to stop sharing. And, Marni, you can kick us off with some of our latest research. So first off, it is such a pleasure to be here with you today, and it's not often I have the opportunity to do a webinar with a 10 plus year veteran of IDC and a hall of famers. Today is a special day. In the Olympics, we're seeing a lot of gold medalists. But if you think about all the work and training and even innovation that goes into training our Olympic medalists, we should be investing that same approach and how we continue to evolve our travel and expense management strategies. You know, from not only the poll question today, but what we see in our life traveling around that many of you are already embracing travel and expense management software. But even if you're using it, there are ways of improving your use of it. Also thinking about how you either apply existing innovations or we really bring new innovations that haven't been seen in the market. We're gonna talk a little bit about that today. Some of you will also be thinking about travel and expense management software, best of breed software. You might call it for the first time. You might also be thinking about how expense management covers not just travel expense, but other types of spend that you can control that way. We're also seeing very much and not just this research that we did, but generally speaking with our customers and our prospects that as we work to create a great experience for our business travelers and I myself have traveled to more than 70 countries around the world. So I definitely know what good travel support is or isn't. Then we have a greater employee autonomy to delight them. They want to see a great mobile app. They also wanna think about how they're able to make decisions in the field in real time and have greater autonomy. The flip side of that is you need your software to even be better to meet your needs and to think about how you give that autonomy without have negatives come through related to compliance to your policy, compliance to your budget expectations as especially important now. We see earnings coming in for public companies, but this is very important for public and private companies. And I think any of you on this call would delight in going to your CEO, your CFO, your board, and saying, hey. With Imverse, I implemented 2, 5, 10, who knows the percentage improvement you can make to the bottom line through this software and also best practices. But definitely we're seeing trends to drive employee autonomy or request from employees for more autonomy, driving the need to revisit your T and E software. Also, how you're looking at compliancy and even looking at fraud solution and protection. We're definitely seeing, and this, I think, hasn't changed, even in all of our careers. It'll soon be 30 years for me. And as I said, Steve and Kevin, I'll talk through as well in their experience. You know, employees find ways sometimes to try and go around policy. So we have best practices and domain expertise on that. We also have software that helps them to prevent them from going against policy. But I think we need to think proactively about why they go against policy and how can we find more intelligent ways of handling that. Or you still have the protection you need, you still have the budget control, but you're delighting your employees. As I can say, I've also been doing expense reports all of my life. At one day, maybe I won't have to because everything is compliant. And I think it's also really important. We'll talk about the trends. So when people spend so much time in advance looking at airfare options, hotel options, etcetera, that takes a lot of your time, management time, the employees time. And in fact, whether you use a TMC or not, if you use in Burks, you can not only make a booking with your chosen OBT, TMC, or even within Imbursed, but with the protection of Imbursed, ReShop and TripAmp, you know that even if the booking wasn't made at the best price, you have an opportunity to fix that over the course of the period until travel or the hotel stay commences. That is a huge advantage that I know some of you on this call are using, but not all of you. We'll talk about that more in some time as well. And then when we look at employee spend, first, we wanna make it compliant like we talked about. We want to reduce fraud to 0. So 100% compliancy to your goals. 0% fraud is what we're looking for. But we also wanna think about even when we're okay and okay can be defined by company, what that means, how do we continue driving forward your goals? Right? Are you getting the more better outcomes? Are you getting the insights, the analytics? Are you driving your business performance, the productivity of your business travelers in the right way? Even if you have compliancy and okay. So with that, we'll talk a little bit about trends. If you think about the convergence of travel and expense, and I apologize if it is breaking up a little bit, I'll try talking a little bit louder. We're getting some storms in Florida, I think, as all of you know, but, unfortunately, no flooding at least for me. So convergence of travel and expense. Steve and Kevin are going to walk through this. We're gonna talk about some examples over the years. We're also gonna talk about some opportunities as there does see more momentum to think about what has worked in the past versus what needs to work better in the future. Best deal certainty. We would rather create a full cycle of automation that we make it super efficient and help that for the original booking. But you have the protection that with Inverse Reshop, Tripcam, you are guaranteed the best, opportunity to make sure that you have the lowest cost booking in your chosen area, class, sustainability, objective, whatever it is. Employees want an easy experience. That's something we want to keep delivering, and we'll talk about that. Real time finance is super important. The more and the more empowered finance teams are, the more easy it is for them to get real time information, the better they're able to do the job. And definitely, we're tracking sustainability, all of us, decarbonization, offset, and other things. So 40% of companies that are ahead of their financial targets are expecting to invest in this. Actually, I think 100% of companies need to be looking at this now. And with that, I will turn over to our hall of famers, both Steve and Kevin, as we talk through these trends and others. Alright. Thanks, Marnie. So Kevin, why don't I take the first one, and then I'll hand it over to you. Sure. Talk about the IDC perspective. So the conversions of travel and inspects and expense. I mean in my mind, when I think about that is connecting the booking process, whether that be through an online booking tool or direct with suppliers, to the expense process and passing data seamlessly between the 2 to make it all work together. The the key objective in that is just automating the expense report. You know what I'm calling one click submission so that all the data is fed in. It knows what to do. It knows how to categorize it. It itemizes the hotel receipts, in OCRs, all the scanning, and so on. So then I get to that expense report. I have very little to do as a traveler, and that requires travel data, card data, receipt data to make that happen. If we can pull that off and do it elegantly, I believe it'll just kind of elevate the whole industry even further, and just make travelers, you know, that much, you know, happier, and satisfied. Kevin, what are your thoughts on it? Yeah. Look. First of all, I wanna say, thank you for inviting me here. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about such a great topic. And, Marnie, boy, I would love to hear about the 70, countries. There's gotta be some really interesting stories in there. But, yeah, you know, to the point that we're we're talking about here, when it comes to certain areas like that convergence, what we've been seeing, is that, more and more companies are looking for not just travel and expense to come together, but also, like, travel expense payments, also travel expense AP. Right? All of these areas where you have sort of your employee spending money, on your behalf, are definitely places where, users are looking for vendors like yourselves to help them consolidate that information. Look. It's hard enough to manage these things, without, you know, sort of the tools that you need, to be able to see, the whole profile of your of your employees spend. And we saw that in a recent survey that we had. We asked over we asked, in our annual SaaSPaaS survey. We asked, TNE users. Over 90% of them said that they would like to see expense management combined with accounts payable. Right? 90% of them said that that would be valuable. A good chunk of those said that it would be extremely valuable. Right? So the appetite is there. But, again, t and e for sure, coming together, and you guys are great examples of that. But beyond that, right, you know, you're seeing expense management, AP, The second and third, options when we asked that question inside the survey, the second and third option were payments and compliance. Right? So you can see how, ultimately, when you're talking about that that need for for convergence, what you're really talking about is this overwhelming desire for more visibility into where my people are, how much they're spending, what vendors are spending it with, so on and so forth. That's a great point, Kevin. And for some of those, Inverse has purchased products like Chrome River and also Certify that have expense management with AP Automation, and payments. And you're right. 1st was an innovator, one of the first movers, thinking about this convergence across capital expense management, AP automation, as well as payments. And when we think about these technology trends and also the investments we're making, we're definitely doubling down on the trend that you're seeing, Kevin. And it also reflects, the partnership that we've made with Finnexio. Even though we're agnostic to different, card programs, we're we're pushing hard with Mastercard, virtual wallet, different ways of handling spend authorizations. There's a lot of interesting opportunities because if you can if you can have the data and automation like Steve talked about, then you don't have to have multiple systems. The accuracy goes way up. Finance has more time to work on other things, and employees have an easier life. Nothing wrong with that. No. No. One of the things that we're seeing and Steve, I know, can back me up on this. One of the things that we're seeing is definitely that desire, to improve the overall user experience and employee experience. It manifests itself in a lot of ways, but one of which is just the you know, at the end of the month, the AP manager, the t and e manager, you know, oftentimes, them and their team are stuck, you know, pulling late nights and not seeing their kids, not getting to that softball game or that that recital that we all don't wanna be at, but we're gonna be there anyway because it's our job. You know, getting more of their time back to them so that they can, you know, that they can, you know, feel, a little bit more enriched and giving them away from sort of the day to day really sort of, in the weeds work. It's really important. Yeah. And that's what that's what I'm talking about is, you know, if an employee is having to schedule a day a month to just fill out the expense reports and get those submitted, something's wrong. You know, especially in today's day and age where we have all the data, it just comes down to connectivity and data capture and OCR and the like, which is all enabled significantly better, through AI. And so, you know, we're investing heavily to make that happen so that we can improve, you know, traveler satisfaction, you know, to the nth degree. Kind of moving along, that kind of is a nice segue into best deal certainty. That's another trend. Because of just all the fragmentation that's going on where travelers can go direct, I can go to supplier websites, I can go to my booking tool, I can go to mobile. You know, and it's it's really difficult for a company and for a traveler to know, did I do the right thing? Did I get the the best rate? Especially when those rates change as often as they do. Hotel rates change by the hour nowadays. Airline fares change by the hour. They get cheaper the closer you get into departure. Should I wait and book then? Should I book now? Should I stay flexible? All of that, you know, it just creates a lot of anxiety. And so we're providing automation to help solve that problem. Don't worry about it. Book the best deal you can today, and we're just gonna be looking at these fares and rates on a regular basis to make sure they're compliant, make sure they're the best deal possible, and then you as a company get to set all the parameters as to whether it's the same hotel, different hotels, same bed, same bed type, same cancel policy, whatever is how restrictive you want to be. Absolutely. You know, just to generate more savings or increase traveler satisfaction. You know? You know? Right? One of the things that we saw, in our research here at IDC, again, with the SaaS Path survey, is we asked them, hey, what are your most challenging areas when it comes to t and e management? Right? What are the big pain points? You know, there there are probably a lot. Everyone on the call is feeling, you know, 1, 2, or 10 of them all at the same time. But amongst the top 3 were definitely trip management. Right? So, Steve, it's exactly that stuff that you're talking about, you know, sort of when, where, how I book, you know, how I I I book, though, that last mile connections, whether it be track you know, whether it be booking a an Uber or choosing, you know, some sort of transportation. You know, that trip management piece was definitely one of the top pain points. So you're absolutely spot on there, Steve. Yeah. One of the things that we've we've done a lot of analysis, and there are better fares and rates to be had on supplier websites than if you go through the traditional channel of an online booking tool, you know, and a travel agency. And is that There was a lot of activity there with American Airlines and kind of what they were doing, but they backed off on that a little bit. But there still seems to be a pretty strong trend, and we think that's gonna continue in the future. So you have to bring that into the mix. You can't just rely solely, you know, on one channel, you know, for your travelers to get those best deals. So we're working on that behind the scenes and, you know, making some pretty good progress. I'm so glad to hear you say that, Steve, because you're absolutely right. The the the real sort of, you know, issue that you're gonna have is, I think it all comes down to that user experience that we talked about. Right? Sometimes you have that online booking tool. It just doesn't give you the experience, the flexibility, the options that you'd like to have to create the travel experience that you want. But think about it from the T and E manager's perspective. This stuff drives you nuts. The fact that, hey, there's a good chunk of spin that's now happening in in a traditional system. If I go outside of the the booking tool, it's happening outside of the booking tool. I don't I can't see it. Right? I I don't have the visibility to it. And that's why, most of those pain points that we talked about in that survey, the top 3 were trip management, auditing, and reporting. They all have to do with visibility. They're all issues that you're trying to figure out what happened. And you're stuck figuring it out after the fact. If you can get to a real time situation, the thing that you're talking about, and then you're able to bring in both that external information, but also, the information that you have internally, bring those 2 together, boy, now you're really cooking. Yeah. That really helps. And I think also, I'm curious, you know, some of the customers and prospects we talked to, they have as many contractors as they have employees. And sometimes these contractors actually are doing even more travel than employees. So we have ways of bringing the contractors with appropriate permissions and even different policies, etcetera, into the system. Because if you have 20, 40, you know, even 20 or 40 percent of your travel expense in some of these companies that's being done by contractors, you want that in the system and you wanna make sure you're still getting the cheapest cost. Yeah. Yeah. And and and look. First of all, I'm gonna apologize. It's hot in my in my, my my den here, and I'm excited. Right? So the 2 the 2 is is just causing me to get pretty riled up. But, you know, the the real key, though, is when you do that, Marty, when you bring that kind of paradigm to it, now all of a sudden, you know, you really sort of accelerate that decision engine, right, that decision paradigm for for the the user. So now you're able to to do things like close the books a little faster. Now you're able to see then, you know, all the all the money that you have, you know, sort of allocated to your employees to cover their spend. And now I can make decisions based on what's left over in terms of treasury, in terms of new new investment. Right? But it all does come down, to being able to to to to to shorten that distance between, you know, sort of these business transactions, the things that are happening in terms of employee travel, and then that information, that insight that you need to make those decisions, cutting that time down, that's kinda what you're talking about there, Mariah. So that's a great lead in actually to Cassiana's question. I hope I pronounced your name right, Cassiana. So such a great question. Oh, that's and it's a great name, by the way. Yes. Exactly. For sure. When you leverage efficiency and user experience, when you're in the same end to end software platform like Imverse has, there's names others might, reference, you know, or know from from how we've assembled the verse. Thinking about the end to end journey, that's when you can really leverage efficiency inside the software. Steve will talk a bit more about that. But related to also controlling for fraud, there's 2 big considerations that I wanna mention and get your feedback on Kevin as well. And then Steve can talk to a little bit the roadmap on where we're going. If you look at how you can utilize credit cards and virtual wallets, spend authorization, that actually will help drive more compliancy and leverage efficiency at the same time. We know that you might have a corporate card program that is limited to certain whatever your policy is, executives or frequent travelers or what have you. You now have the ability to reimburse to leverage virtual wallet, short term cards, and authorization, etcetera. So you're automatically getting the benefit of the real time data being in the system. You're getting the fraud checks from the credit card company and Burse, etcetera. We also are putting a lot of innovation and investment into real time fraud checks. So that's something that we're doing through our own proprietary large language models that are secure only using internal data, etcetera. You'll hear more about that from Imbursed. But when you can do the real time fraud checks, even as the expense is being booked and incurred, you know, then the control check coming in, then you have a much higher likelihood of catching any fraud even prior to when an expense report is submitted or running the real time checks on the expense report when it's submitted even before approval. You can also be running those checks even if it seems to be in compliance, like where you'd have an auto approval, you can still run the fraud checks. This, I think, will be very important, these changes, because a lot of the products that have been in the market have waited for the expense report to be submitted. Maybe that has credit card data, maybe it doesn't. Then it goes to other third parties or comes back to your team, to review it. By then, people might be too busy or not remember or what have you. So the closer you can get to the data, like you said, Kevin, the more the data can be in the system that drives efficiency, compliancy, and, of course, lessens fraud as well, with the additional things that we can do. So, Steve, I know we're doing a lot to make sure that we're reducing fraud and getting the lowest price for the value before, but I think this question really talks about what we wanna do as we either file expense reports or track that expense through to reimbursement. Yeah. I mean, it's a real balance act. I mean, you wanna have travelers to be easy and automated and all that, but at the same time, you have to make sure it's compliant and that there's not fraud in the system. So it's it's a tricky thing to solve, but but I do think that we're on the right track, that if we can get the travel data, the card data, as well as the receipts, and we know the corporate policy. It's kind of baked into the system and all the rules to know what a compliant trip is. We know the preferred vendors. We know what the preferred rates are and fares and so on, that we can automate, you know, almost a 100% of this process and be confident that there's not fraud, and it actually is going to be a better outcome than the manual process because we can check every single line item and every single expense expense report real time, you know, using the systems. No. And that's a really good point, Michael. That's another good question. So how do you do what you're speaking to? And I'll actually have to go talk to our head of data science. It's a good, thing for Steve and me to do after this call. When you have the LLM model and the real time fraud checkers, you can run it on different fields. So when you have a really top class OCR that has the clarity of data and the real time checking, you'll read the data fast, like milliseconds. And then we can run the fraud checks for, you know, dates, amounts, vendors, things like that. And you can accelerate the learning of the real time fraud model and the LLMs, the large language model checking for these sort of things. So so that way, once you read the data in whether you know the receipt is is a duplicate receipt or not, you can start running those checks. And it actually is quite similar, for expense management, how you do it to even some of the warranty type software, other sorts of things that actually are looking for fraud and kind of what are high frequency, you know, employee type or customer type submissions. Yeah. And and I I just I think I don't have much to add here except that there's there's a technology side to this equation. I was on a expense fraud webinar not long ago. There's definitely a technology side to this that you guys are talking about, the use of large language models to interrogate, the datasets in real time, the use of, cards so that you can, you can specify and really dictate what, the the use so that it's it's, you know, inherently in policy. Right? Because it it won't work at any other, you know, sort of merchant or any other, you know, sort of establishment except the one that's approved. Of course, you wanna utilize OCR and and ML to kinda get all that data into the system. There's definitely a technology angle to here you know, to this point. But to the point of fraud too, there's also a people angle. Right? So the communication angle needs to, you know, that needs to be brought up here. You have to be able to communicate the the policies. They have to understand them, know where to find them, be able to maybe utilize, again, technology here in terms of a bot to ask questions, of the policy. There are always some fuzzy fuzzy front end kinda, use cases that you run into, some gray areas. Right? Gray areas usually don't have anything to do with with with sports cars, I've learned. So that's not a gray area, but there are some. Right? But it it does come down to some communication, for sure. That's actually a great point. You know, you can't have technology without people. People definitely like to bring that up. Steve, you know, we have a question here from Laurie that is a really relevant one, and I know it's one that you're very familiar with in in helping companies to manage. So an airline booking gets canceled. I know in my experience, it's not too easy to track all of my airline bookings. Not all are necessarily refundable. Some are. Some aren't. The ones that you need to get refunded, that's an action item. But the ones that you actually wanna use that credit and then depending on how you book the ticket, you know, whether you can also use it with another employee. But regardless, you know, companies don't wanna waste money. We don't like that. So, certainly, you don't want to cancel airline tickets and never reuse them. So how do we help with that? Yeah. So this is a big issue, especially, know, coming out of COVID there was a huge amount of canceled tickets and balances, and so some of the airlines issued, yeah, cards so that they could be used for future spend across any employee. I know some of them have kind of kept that solution in place going forward for larger companies. A lot of it depends upon the size of the company, and it also depends on the airline, as to how they handle situations like this. But for the most part, a canceled ticket has to be used by the employee, that purchased the original ticket. Most airlines don't allow what's called a name change or a waiver in favor so that you can use that across any employee. However, there's exceptions that some airlines, as I I mentioned, will put that credit balance onto a card, and then you can use that card for purchases but you gotta be big and you gotta be with, you know, kind of throwing the right amount of market share to the right airlines in order to get that kind of flexibility. So, Sandra, you're right that we're talking now, and this is probably why we're using Imbursed as a name to really integrate the the innovation and the best of breed acquisitions that we've made. So, Sasha, maybe you can post, either as a follow-up or in the chats, our recent PR that we did for GBTA talking about the end to end, t and e strategy. So you're a 100% correct, Sandra, that we are bringing together, well, some things are already unified. Right? We have travel expense management, integrations to OBTs, payment solutions, etcetera. But we're further enhancing that with the integration of TripBam called Immerse Reshop now, our investment in LLM, really thinking through some of our other payment solutions and stuff, etcetera. So we'll share that PR and certainly love a follow on chat. Please check out the website for anyone as well that was recently updated talking about how we're integrating together. It makes me really proud, of course, to have joined Inverse that has led innovation and so many of these founder, owned founder started companies that have become, inverse. So with that, maybe we'll get on with a few more trends. I know we have a little bit more time, Steve and Catherine. Yeah. And so, Marni, those are actually in the document section. So perfect that you mentioned them. If anybody wants to read more, there's several articles. Before we get a little bit far from we started talking about how technology improves compliance. We and a lot of it has to do with AI. We actually wanna do a couple of poll questions and see the role of AI and how it's been, you know, improving convenience for you. So, let's do this one. Okay. I'm going to open this poll question. So, tell us, how often do you use generative AI for work? Is it every day? Is it 3 to 4 days per week? Is it 1 to 2 days? Or you don't use AI in your role? The the reason we're asking you this now is we also wanna try, after this question, ask you the next one because AI is everywhere. And even sometimes we don't realize, it truly powers a lot of what we need to do with travel and expense. And, you know, Steve and Kevin, feel free to jump in. I know there's so much that is backed by AI, and I don't think a lot of people realize it. Right? We talk about AI and finance all the time now, and there's such divided opinions, you know, about, like, what is truly used for. So looks like we do have 60% don't use genera AI in your role. So maybe that's something that we'll see changing as well. Next time we do the trend Yeah. But I'm gonna close this poll and actually open the next one. So for those who do use it, just tell us what you do currently use it. And while the results coming in, Kevin and Steve, what is your thought? Yeah. So we had a we had a an entire survey that was built, for, to answer the question about what people are doing with with generative AI. It's been the topic du jour of a lot of vendors that we work with here at IDC. It's also on on the minds of the investor community. And and even when we help companies build shortlist, it's definitely a consideration that they that they like to to understand about the company that they're about to, you know, sort of engage with. For us, we definitely see, we we definitely see the the the role of of GenAI, sort of growing rapidly over the next 2 or 3 years. We see it growing in the areas of, first, the according to the survey here, the top areas will be around, expense management automation. So helping them sort of automate. We talked a little bit about, automation already, but we're we're definitely, gonna be utilizing it for expense management automation. That includes, you know, things like expense report creation, employee reimbursement payments, and of course, reporting and analytics. The second place that that you see, people are anticipating, the ways that generative AI will improve their their their system or their their process will be around simplifying the user experience. Right? So, being able to interrogate large sums of of data, being able to interrogate that, you simply typing in your, your request. Hey. How many people do we have going to to to, to the event in Tucson? How many of them are, you know, have clients that will also be there. Right? All of this information is all over the place. But GenAI offers the opportunity to sort of simplify that user experience. You'll also see it playing out in terms of, Gen AI being used to help you with suggestions for travel. Hey. We see that you're going to Tucson. Hey. You know, the last the last group of people that went the last time we did this this event. We stayed in these particular hotels. We used these particular vendors, right? Bringing all that information right to you in a in a written form, in a in a summarized fashion, that's exciting stuff. And those will be the 2 places where we see Gen AI really sort of landing first. But to be fair, I think we're still in that, and and I think the data here shows it. I think we're still in the infancy, right, still in the beginning phases. To put it in Olympic parlance, everyone's still on the starting block. Right? I just got done watching all the sprints and stuff, so my head's still there. Everyone's still in the starting block, just coming out of the starting block. I think in the next 3 or 4 years, we'll we'll really see, gen AI take off. One of the ways I like to talk about technology because I started at the beginning of my career, and I focused on software and and telco and some other areas. You know, AI has been around for decades, but often you needed to be a developer or a data scientist to work with. Now when I talk about our consumption as regular people, you know, would you prefer to go read all the encyclopedias, you know, or would you prefer to ask a question to a Gen AI, engine that's pure and understands your question well? I mean, obviously, the latter. Right? It's much more time efficient. It's easy. It's so, you know, Gen AI will continue to be adopted. Definitely agree with you because it's easy. It's simple. It puts information at our fingertips. But we need to make sure, and we certainly can with expense management, is the data is clean, it's accurate, it's secure, it's locked down in our systems. So that enables it to be increasingly useful. We have some great questions that popped in. And I wanna talk a little bit about them because I think they really feed into, Kevin and Steve, what you've been talking about. So first off, definitely, you know, we've talked about employee. But there's a lot of, best and best practice we can drive for finance teams. When you look at integrating t and e, AP, and payments, sometimes you might have separate silos still in in groups. You also have many departments that might have their own finance travel managers you're trying to aggregate through. So I think, certainly, we can help drive not only the knowledge sharing across, more dispersed businesses, on best practice, you know, again, recommendations. Lori had an idea on this, not just tracking budget. We can do that through the analytics, session, if that's how you say the name. I apologize if I mispronounced it. But I think, like, with Laurie, if someone books at a conference late, one, you have to decide whether you allow them to go to the conference or not. But I think Steve and Kevin, we talked about whether you use Gen AI or just regular things. We can give them better potential reshop options or other suggestions, or we can even know a conference is coming up and give them prompts so that they don't book late. Thoughts? Yeah. I mean, there's a good question from Laurie that just kind of flew up there, that, we could jump on, but but kind of building on the AI theme a little bit and specifically generative AI, you know, I'm trying hard to find use cases for it, just kind of in my general job in what I do. I mean, just wording emails better, critical documents that have to have the right tone. It seems to be helpful there. I haven't found a real need to create kittens on the beach type of pictures yet, but, it can be done. But the real step forward is gonna be OCR ing of receipts, you know, the capturing of hotel folio data, which if you get all the data and you have enough of it, it will improve fraud detection. So to answer one of the questions that flew by there a minute ago, fraud detection is gonna get a lot easier. As a result, this is gonna take a bit of time. And then in my role as kind of in the dev and engineering side, the creation of code and speeding up programmers, we're definitely seeing an impact there. But you gotta balance that with the whole security aspects and and such, of what some of these systems can do. But back on that one question about if a traveler books a conference late and, you know, with better rates is full and the employee books a hotel for twice the amount, there's lots of different ways to handle that. One is you can set per diems or market caps and so on to where that traveler just has to go down market. If you're used to staying in 4 star, the only way you can go now is to stay in a 3 star, and you might have to, you know, book a hotel that's a little bit further away, than you like. But there there's lots of different ways to support that, you know, and solve that problem. So Yeah. Where do we go from here? I've I've definitely been just just so that you guys know, I've definitely been in that situation where time management got away from me, and I've had to book late, and the room block for the conference has been been, you know, used up, in that situation. Yeah. To Steve's point, you end up if you're in Vegas, you end up in you end up in Henderson. One of the places Yeah. It is what it is. Yeah. I forgot to mention is that, you know, we have hotel clustering technology so that if you tell it where you want, we're going to shop other hotels nearby and let the best rate win, and oftentimes I beat the conference rate by booking a hotel across the street, and I get a coupon, you know, to get my kids breakfast if I want, you know. Trip Am had a funny, competition against conference rates versus, like, Tripam rates as it got closer. And, actually, if you use TRIP dam often, you can if that does happen, you can beat the confidence rate. I do think there's a really good question again, that came in related to California that ties into some of the the trends and topics that we started this webinar at. And I know Dasha is starting to monitor time. So what I what I recommend, and I'll ask Steve and Kevin to comment, is this sort of of issue does come up. Right? It comes up in the US related to California. It also comes up all around the world. For those of you who might not know, we have users in more than a 120 countries and actually more than a 180 currencies, which I always find a fascinating, statistic. So one of the recommendations that we started discussing with customers in California is where all of your California employees or contractors, give them a virtual wallet or give them an Inverse card because then you're getting the data in real time from the credit card companies. So effectively, you're already controlling the spend. If you wanna pre authorize trips or what have you, you don't have the issue of an employee using their own card, and you're getting a receipt 3 years. Of course, occasionally, maybe, you know, you'll have things that you still have to deal with. But in general, to avoid that, you know, in the past, corporate card strategies were fairly restrictive. Now there's a lot more, ways of managing it technologically as well as through people and process. We are working to get in 1st virtual cards going in Canada, Europe, Australia, a variety of other places. So, again, the more we can do with, card and payment technology that's within the system, the better off you are, generally speaking. And certainly, we're also working, around the world as an international Fintech perspective. When it comes to Fintech internationally, there's a lot of different regulations and things that we need to work through, but we're definitely working with a lot of the best partners, Mastercard, Stripe, Connexio as well as there's a variety of other partners that we work with depending on where. So, Alina, we have that in mind for California, and I'll actually, mention that to Kaylee Phillips that we had a question on that. But, Steve and Kevin, let's talk through kind of how we can change approaches to solve some of these very real business problems. So, so yeah. So I I think I think the issue that that you run into when it comes to reimbursements, and being able to do it in an efficient manner, being able to do it in a, a speedy and sort of, you know, timely manner as well. I I do think that you run into the issue that we go back to, which is visibility. Right? If if if I'm able to utilize card in such a way that, you know, the card utilizes AI, It knows that, because of geolocation. I'm in Las Vegas. It knows that I'm, you know, I'm supposed to be there for this trip. Now all of my expenses that I put on that card automatically reported back. Right? And then I I eliminate that that, that expense report, aspect. All of a sudden now I can get reimbursed a lot faster. Right? You know, the thing that that stops you from getting reimbursed quickly and efficiently is the fact that we rely on sort of an antiquated process, which is and I don't know about you guys, but I'm I'm at least 2 trips behind, which is I have to figure out what I spent. Then I have to put it in some sort of form, and then I have to submit it, and then they have to review it. But if we could, you know, sort of get in that that mindset of more real time, sort of visibility, I think we can eliminate we can eliminate a lot of that that sort of consternation around, you know, expenses and those sorts of things. Yeah. To add to that, we're calling it sort of, compliance through convenience. Yes. Or complain I don't know which word comes first, but anyway, if the traveler does the right thing, if they book the right suppliers Yep. If they use the right card for payment, if they capture the receipts along the way that they're supposed to. That expense report gets down to a one click submission. The only thing you have to enter is maybe mileage to and from the airport, and that can be fairly automated. Basically saying, I drove to the airport. Done. I know where the airport is. I know where your home is. I'll calculate the mileage. You don't have to do any of that, and that avoids that kind of fraud situation as well. They click it. They get paid if it's all compliant, you know, if they did the right thing. What you wanna do is look. If you're not compliant, you went off the ranch and booked in some different channel. You used your own personal card when you weren't supposed to, you went off and didn't use my preferred suppliers or book the right rates, now you gotta spend time building an expense report and going through this fairly cumbersome process of giving me reasons why. You know, you didn't do the right thing and then over time you learn. It's a feedback loop. Right? Yep. You learn. That's a hassle. Even though I like Marriott a lot, there's a cheaper Hilton Hyatt IHG right around the street. You know, if I don't book those, when I book that Marriott, I'm gonna have to create an expense report. Well, I'm gonna think twice, you know. Are the points worth it at that point in time? So do that across the entire, you know, of all the stuff that they spend money on, and eventually they it's like self fulfilled. You don't even have to publish the policy. They will learn the policy over time, you you know, just through the process. Interesting. Yeah. I actually have one last question, for our hall of famers here as we wrap it up. If you have lowest cost booking, you know, you're driving the, the integrated solutions across travel expense management, spend payments, you're doing your fraud checks, etcetera. You have all of that under control. Do you still need an expense policy anymore? Steve and Kevin, what do you think on that provocative thought? No. I think you do. I think you need a policy in order to set the rules of what's compliant or not. I mean, so are you gonna allow a VIP to do whatever they want? Maybe. Are you going to if they're flying internationally, are the rules gonna be different than the there's so many variables that come play that you have to account for which requires, you know I don't know if I'd call it a policy. I just call it a set of rules that we all have to live by. And what is compliant? Once you figure that out and it learns over time, it's not really a document. It's just more the rules that are embedded in the system to automate kinda beginning to end. And you have a chat? Absolutely. And it changes, depending on the on the the segment, right, the the the vertical market. In the consulting, you know, sort of high end consulting world, What's normal there, what's acceptable there is very different than, you know, what you'll find on the, you know, manufacturing or or government, you know, sort of travel. Right? You know, what what what might be, you know, good there could be, hey, season tickets. I I need that to entertain my clients. You know, here's 30 ks for, you know, decent tickets at the Patriots stadium. That might not fly somewhere else. So there is definitely a a, a a need for some sort of rule, some sort of framework. But do you need, you know, to Steve's point, do you need, you know, 3,000 word document about every single little thing? Probably not. Right? But but what I do know is that people will push the limit. Right? I mean, people will find the limit. Yes. No. Yeah. Exactly. So speaking of that, talking about limits and people, you know, the other topics that have come up in some of our customer advisory boards to get, your feedback on is knowing those behaviors and and what have you. If an average trip, let's just make up the number, to New York City is 5,000 with your compliant travelers And you want to say, hey. Let's see. I'll give you 35100 to go spend on whatever you want, including something that might be noncompliant. Spending versus compliance fee. What do you guys think about that? Spending versus compliancy. What do you guys think about that? Has it come up in your discussions, advice for people who might be getting those questions themselves internally? Yeah. I mean, I've there's been a couple of software solutions. One called Rocket Trip that's no longer in business, which basically had that kind of, you know, we're gonna set a limit, and if you book below that, you know, we'll actually reimburse you a percentage of the difference so you'll get points to purchase stuff. And it really didn't take hold. Most corporate travelers, are just not as focused on cost savings as much as we might like. Right? They're gonna lean to way towards convenience than they are for than on cost savings. And it's just the nature of the beast. So if you make their life easier and you make it convenient, you know, they'll kinda do the right things. If it's all about cost and save the company a $100, they don't pay attention nearly as much as we might want them to. That's my personal experience. I've heard of this gamification kinda trend where you, you know, sort of incentivize certain behaviors. I've actually seen it work better when you're talking about incentivizing things like, sustainability and ESG. I've actually seen, cases where, you know, you can you can utilize your policy to incentivize walking, you know, that that last mile from the from, from the hotel to the, you know, to the to the event, or or taking the train if possible. Right? I've I've actually seen that because it comes with this sort of warm fuzzy feeling that, you know, you're contributing to a greener and better, you know, sort of future. That does seem to be a little bit more of a, of a, a differentiator or, or a little bit, more, of a, of a bigger motivator than, than you might find when it comes to pure dollars. But I I do I do think that gamification there there's a there's a role that it can play for sure. Awesome. So we had a quick question about Certify. Our 2 best known, just for the record, expense management products are Chrome River and Certify. Both are very much in the market, growing well. You can learn more about the segmentation, reach out to our sales team, account management, customer success teams, etcetera. We've updated the website to be hopefully a little bit easier to navigate, based on your needs, but certainly the products are there. Our customers that are also on expense management products is Cap Geo in Europe, also a great acquisition we made. You might know other acquisitions we made, Nexonia, Spring Ahead, and Tally, that continue to be in the market. You know, again, to wrap this up, we're so proud of all the innovation that we've done to date across travel, expense management, AP Automation, and payments. And as you've hopefully heard in this webinar, the future is very bright and it's bright not only because of the trends that we're seeing, but also the feedback from our great customers and prospects like those on the webinar. So I'll turn it over to you, Dasha, to wrap up. And, again, thank you very much. Thank you, Marni. Thank you, Kevin and Steve, for session insightful discussion. I know we're a little bit over time, but this was so great because I learned a lot and I hope our audience did too. For those of you who didn't get your question, we'll, you know, answer them and then send you a follow-up email. Thank you so much to everyone for attending the webinar today. We hope you do will join us for our future events, and I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you. Bye. Thanks, everyone. Bye.