Put a Card at the Center of Your Travel and Expense Program to Maximize Visibility and Control

In a Nutshell: Corporate travel and expense management platforms can’t offer employees and teams a comprehensive solution because they can only process the transactions you put into them. Center “recenters” expense management from platforms to its CenterCard, an integrated corporate credit card with software and a mobile app that makes managing holistic company spend simple. Teams are everywhere these days. Employees use their CenterCards wherever and whenever they need to find efficiencies and explore alternatives to get things done — all under the real-time eye of the folks back home.

The rise of Center as a corporate travel and expense management solution based on a credit card shows that decades of conventional wisdom about the advantages of platforms may be falling by the wayside.

Sure, you may have thought you were onto something when you adopted a standalone digital solution that entered the market in the 1990s as a replacement for spreadsheets and paper receipts.

But as work and work-related travel and expensing have matured and diversified — both before COVID and after — more firms sense the imperative of platforms born in the cloud and flexible enough to work with employees and teams.

Co-Founder and SVP of Product Nik Singh said Center lets finance admins and travel managers view the entire suite of your spend in real time, without the complexities and challenges of platform-based solutions.

What’s more, companies pay when they tap rather than through a preconceived fee structure, incentivizing the Center team to engage its customers to use the product. Careful attention to detail and customer needs allows Center to provide a seamless solution that teams may have felt they deserved but never imagined was possible. Every deployment is very high-touch, with clients receiving world-class support.

“For us, what really matters is that spenders understand how to use their cards to eliminate the need for traditional batch-based expense-report processing,” Singh said. “Also essential is consulting with finance teams to help them fully leverage the back-office advantages of real-time expense modeling and how to drive automation to what was previously manual.”

The result helps teams in all verticals gain efficiencies. Center’s customizability makes professional services and construction firms its earliest adopters because it meets their complex needs without constraining them.

“We strive to win our customers’ business every single day,” Singh said. “No pun intended, but recentering the travel management control point on our corporate card is the strongest and most powerful way for you to address today’s modern travel problem.”

Center retooled around corporate spend management around 2017-18 to leverage preexisting banking relationships. The retooling also took place at a time when payment providers such as Marqueta and Stripe were beginning to offer APIs that enabled software/bank partnerships to deliver integrated fintech card experiences.

Singh said this recentering now allows Center to check all the expense management boxes for teams interested in saving time and money through a product that compounds the benefits of using it because the real-time data access it provides is complete.

Control and visibility are the centerpieces of the strategy. Travel managers are able to drive policy compliance more effectively because real-time visibility through Center extends beyond managed spending in whatever booking solution the company uses to unmanaged spending through other means. That means seeking to change a behavior or set a new limit by “pushing a button” in the app, so to speak, is more likely to produce the intended result.

Knowledge is power. Gaining more knowledge through Center’s card-centric ability to pull in data from everywhere makes applying expertise more precise.

Automation is also a key. Singh said having the card rather than a platform as your single point of truth automates the generation of the expense because there’s so much data on the card you can use in the auto-creation process.

“For example, through Smart Receipts, we’re able to generate an IRS-compliant line-item receipt for up to 40% of transactions on our platform,” Singh said. “If you’re tapping your card at an airline, let’s say, even outside your booking tool, we can automate the entire expensing process just because they’re using their CenterCard.”

Configurability boosts usability further. Although Center can serve any vertical with a need for expense management, firms in professional services and construction flock to it through word-of-mouth because it provides the options they need without overwhelming them with choices and forcing them to burrow around in menus.

“You can filter projects and jobs according to employee categories and even based on the individual coding of the expense,” Singh said. “We simplify the complex processes of legacy systems and individualize the results for each end user.”

Through what Singh called Center’s consumption-based pricing model, there’s no charge to use its products until you actually use them. Some players in the space, including many with card offerings, have moved to a licensing model. Center’s pay-as-you-go pricing results in clear positives for customers and the company.

The Center website lays out the model. Taps and swipes generate interchange fees the card platform — in this case, Mastercard — shares with Center, with no need for the customer to make an upfront investment or pay a fee.

In fact, those fees usually change hands without customers even realizing it. Meanwhile, they pay for corporate travel only when they book. According to the website, Center charges a flat fee per trip that includes unlimited itinerary changes, self-service cancellations and adjustments, and 24/7 omnichannel traveler support and services.

We think it’s a creative response to a common problem in software services. All too often, signing an upfront contract leads to product underutilization and failure on the team’s part to communicate its value proposition effectively enough to generate repeat business and word-of-mouth growth.

In contrast, the Center product team knows it has to back up its smooth-talking sales team with a feature set that walks the walk — or nobody gets paid. That’ll get your attention real quick, Singh said.

“In software, engagement can be minimal when there isn’t a tight connection between serving the client and revenue,” he said.

Singh said the consumption-based approach also helps build trust during the customer acquisition process. It almost unconsciously incentivizes the team to align its interests with the customers’ to increase the chances of a successful outcome.

That’s why the work with finance teams is so valuable in producing the desired result. Center coaches many of its midmarket enterprise clients to see the value in automating manual processing and bringing managed and unmanaged spend under one easier-to-use umbrella.

“Typically, we like to sit alongside you through your first few month-end closes to make sure you’re comfortable with your setup before we hand you off to account management,” Singh said.

It really is a paradigm shift in thinking about what should be the starting point of corporate expense management. In contrast to what a cloud-first usability platform like Center can provide through its CenterCard, server-based legacy platforms leave decision-makers at least partially in the dark.

Singh said the value adds start to become apparent as soon as expected transactional timelines start to change in the customer’s favor. For example, some legacy products typically require a month or more to provide a granular view of unmanaged off-platform data.

“Best case scenario, you’re dealing as a controller or travel manager with a lack of real-time visibility,” Singh said. “More realistically, you’re coping with a lack of data accuracy.”

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that managers produce the best policy-change decisions based on all, not some, of their travel spend. Through Center’s new Insights for Travel dashboard, users can instantly determine whether an off-platform booking was compliant with existing rules, assess the potential long-term consequences if similar bookings turn out to fall in a gray area, and then make a confident policy change to fix the problem.

In other words, it works the way it should.

Decisions requiring insights over the longer term leverage holistic data and allow managers to experiment with the effects of different policy changes. Holistic data availability, then, not only reveals potential pain points but increases the certainty behind managerial remedies.

“You’re able to change limits and controls to drive or change behavior,” Singh said.

Singh said clients in the midmarket tiers Center typically inhabits place a premium on the direct savings of its consumption-based model. But clients usually value intangible benefits and efficiencies more as they move upmarket.

That makes sense to us. We think a great way to learn you’re doing it wrong is by performing a large number of repetitive tasks inefficiently.

“A booking tool is important for complex travel scenarios,” Singh said. “But our card-centric solution powers unified travel insights.”