American Express Global Business Travel and SAP Concur last week announced a new “strategic alliance” that includes the launch of an integrated travel and expense platform, called Complete, to which joint customers will be migrated. BTN editors Andy Hoskins and Michael Baker spoke with Charlie Sultan, president of Concur Travel; Fred Fredericks, general manager and chief product officer at SAP Concur; and Evan Konwiser, chief product and strategy officer at Amex GBT. Excerpts from the short briefing appeared in BTN Europe’s initial news story; below is a fuller version of what they had to say on several aspects of the development.
On the rationale for the alliance…
Evan Konwiser is chief product and strategy officer at American Express Global Business Travel
Evan Konwiser: “Amex GBT recognised long
ago that you need to bring the different pieces of the ecosystem together in
order to go at pace and frankly deliver what our customers want. We acquired
Egencia and Neo nine years ago to bring more of the technology ecosystem to us.
And we think this is important for the past but even more important for the
future. The direction of travel is more fragmentation, more power of data to
drive the AI change that’s happening and is going to accelerate and so we feel
that having the ecosystem as tightly together as one is what’s going to drive
the future for the industry.
“We felt not only was it important, but also to
do that with the solution that so many of our customers are on and want to
continue to drive that SAP ecosystem. We also know that hooking in expense
fully into the solution across the board is absolutely necessary to drive the
future of the experience and evolution of the industry. So in being able to put
ourselves with SAP Concur, we are doing exactly what our customers have
asked us to do which is to build a futureproof solution with the right UX that
drives frictionless travel, that has data flowing in a way that drives the
right experiences, and that powers the AI tools of today and tomorrow.”
Charlie Sultan: “We all know the industry is evolving
rapidly. We can see continued vertical integration and more challenges of
content fragmentation, and I think we’re going to see in the near future that
the criticality of robust, complete data is going to make unified solutions
more and more valuable to customers, travellers and suppliers.”
Fred Fredericks: “Why GBT?
We’ve been partnering with them for 20 years. But they’re not just a TMC,
they’re a true software company. They get software, they get AI, and that’s
important to us as a software company if we’re going to co-innovate – we need
people on the GBT side we can be working with. They have a very comprehensive
marketplace with over 600 airlines and 2 million hotel properties, they can get
the content where it is and deliver it on favourable terms to customers. There’s a shared value here.”
On the rollout of new Concur Travel (T2) and its
implications…
Charlie Sultan is president of Concur Travel
Charlie Sultan: “We’ve re-platformed Concur Travel and we heard very positive feedback
about the experience, the content, the AI capabilities. But I think that’s
really only the beginning of the rapid evolution. One of the things that became
evident as we went through transitioning customers from legacy Concur to new Concur
Travel… we had to work with so many different TMCs who are using so many
different systems and back offices, and they all wanted to spend time planning,
testing and certifying, and convincing them to move customers.
“So we really saw that 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. We saw, and still see, that some customers
are frustrated [about the T2 transition] because they are hearing different
messages maybe from us or their TMC or their TMC wasn’t ready, but we were
ready.
“We realised the approach
that we’ve taken for the last years is not going to be fit for the next 10 years
so. To move faster… we can’t do it as one part of the ecosystem. We need to
do that with a partner, and while we’re going to continue to support and
innovate on the new Concur Travel and the existing system of reseller and
servicing TMCs, we’re also changing the game to strengthen our position and
offering to customers in combination with Amex GBT. And so by building a future
together we feel we can offer customers an even more comprehensive solution
that adds value across travel, expense, payment, servicing, and I think we can
do that a lot faster.”
On the integrated T&E platform…
Fred Fredericks is general manager and chief product officer at SAP Concur
Fred Fredericks: “The strategic
alliance will comprehensively integrate our technology engineering capabilities
and expense management solutions with GBT’s robust software services and
innovative marketplace platform. It [Complete] is a co-developed, next generation solution
with AI at its core. AI will be integrated throughout the process, enhancing
the traveller insights, content acquisition, offer creation, mutli-channel
communication, offer presentation, unified customer support... We’re bringing
all that GBT marketplace content into Complete and into the SAP tech stack
which will offer cost saving as well as greater incentives.
“That content will
help Complete deliver the next generation of modern retailing. We’ll get NDC
content out the door much more quickly – again that’s about having one partner
to focus on. That will definitely help. We have all the SAP data, all the
Concur data, and now all the GBT data that we can put together and build that
one solution.”
On the development of
Complete and its roadmap…
Fred Fredericks: “We’re
not cannibalising our existing offering. We have added additional people to
build out Complete and we’ll continue to support Concur Travel and the existing
ecosystem. We will have people dedicated to Complete travel and expense in
addition to what we’ve had on the [T2] platform. There will still be innovation
in T2. A roadmap for Complete will be published in the next few weeks. It is
quarterly but releases will be much more frequent than quarterly. Innovating at
pace – that’s the philosophy here. Customers can opt-in to new functionality
more or less constantly and the GBT team is aligned with that pace.”
On the Egencia integration…
Fred Fredericks: “We have thousands of
customers who just have Concur Expense and might not want a super, highly
managed travel programme [that Amex GBT offers], and so we’ll be able to bring
Egencia, with all that content and favourable economics and features, into the Concur
Expense ecosystem there.”
On the migration of customers to Complete….
Evan Konwiser: “Our joint portfolio is considerable and will be upgraded to Complete
starting in about a month’s time. We will review with them the plan, but CWT
customers are Amex GBT customers, let’s be clear on that. Obviously we’re only
a few weeks into it [the acquisition of CWT] and we’ll have a plan for them which we’ll talk about with them.”
Fred Fredericks: “Customers
will be able to opt into it later this month and we’ll be moving joint
customers over to it next month [November]. Customers can opt-out but the value
that customers are going to get from this will make moving over obvious.”
Charlie Sultan: “In the roll-out
of the new Concur there was a lot of innovation and there might have been a few
features which weren’t coming along, or different things available at different
times, but in this case there is nothing that the Complete offering is going to
be lacking relative to new Concur travel. There is not a reason for customers
not to want to come along.”
On the readiness of the tech…
Evan Konwiser: “Our teams
have been working together now for quite a while to get to this point so
[although] it is the beginning of a journey, we’re not issuing a release
telling you we may get something out next year. This is something we’ve been
building towards already and we’re super-excited now to launch, and you’ll see
a lot of the proof of that in the coming weeks. Speed and delivery for our
customers is one of the absolute first design elements of this alliance. It
might be the single most important galivanting element of this – we recognise
the pace of the changing environment. We need to collectively deliver for them.”
On the support of other platforms…
Charlie Sultan: “New Concur Travel is the newest booking tool in the market. It’s still
integrated into the best expense tool and the best ERP system out there, and so
TMCs will still have the full ability to continue to resell and to continue to
service Concur Travel. I think they should be very excited to continue to be
able to support that.”
Evan Konwiser: “Neo [Amex GBT’s proprietary booking tool] continues to be a solution that
we support. It has been very successful for us and it will continue to be a
part of our portfolio. But what we have here is an opportunity to do something
for our SAP ecosystem customers.”