American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) has launched
Neo1, a new service to help owner-managed businesses control cashflow through a
single platform.
Neo1 integrates purchasing capabilities from Amazon
Business, as well as GBT’s online travel booking tool. It allows finance teams
to manage all spend categories, such as office supplies, utilities and travel
bookings, in one place. It gives them real-time visibility of money spent, money
committed and future spend requests.
Speaking to BTN Europe, Fiona Hastings, general
manager of Neo1, said she has headed up a team of developers who have been
working on the project for the last three years. “It was important to us that
we didn’t use old technology, so we built the whole platform from scratch,”
Hastings said. “The reason I was so interested in taking on the project was I
felt that globally, traditional expense management platforms are really not
good enough for the SME market. I thought it was time to try to solve that problem.
“The biggest conundrum we’ve faced is people saying: ‘But
you’re a travel management company – where does employee spend management fit?’
But for SMEs, it’s not just about the travel from them and booking a trip from
A to B; it’s about the multiple systems they’re having to use to manage
expenses – it’s about all of their expenses relating to employees, apart from
capital expenditure and payroll. When we were doing our research, people said if
we could package that all up in one ‘box’ they’d be interested.
“It’s one system, whether you’re booking a trip or buying a
flipchart; any expense that an employee triggers as part of doing their job can
be managed in Neo1.”
Neo1 integrates payments from corporate cards, while the same
system can also be used to log claims for reimbursement.
According to a poll conducted by GBT in February 2020,
nearly three-quarters of business owners said controlling spend was more
important for making strategic business decisions than it had been five years
previously. One in five admitted they did not have visibility of their business
expenses from the previous 30 days. Hastings said the coronavirus crisis has
placed these issues in even sharper focus for SMEs.
Hastings said one of the benefits of building Neo1 from the
ground up is it was designed on an API-first model, meaning it will be faster to
integrate new complementary systems as and when clients request them or
partnerships are formed. “If a client has a specific use case for a system they
use, we can give them access to the API and all the documentation they would
need to have tech people create the integration.”
When it comes to reporting, Hastings said Neo1 itemises
every expense, including the total cost of a business trip, and each expense
can be attributed to individual departments or employees. “We really felt like
SMEs deserve this kind of granular detail,” she added.
Neo1 features an online onboarding process, with
implementation typically taking about 48 hours. Onboarding also gives clients
access to travel management services provided by GBT. According to Hastings,
this provides SMEs with a simpler, less resource-heavy route to partnering with
a TMC than the traditional onboarding process.
The platform is currently available in the UK, but GBT has
plans to roll it out in other markets in the future.