One of our technology clients aimed to optimise their corporate travel, meetings and events payments and expense management system with a specific focus on streamlining payment and reconciliation processes. Their goals
The client was struggling with a fragmented travel, payment and expense ecosystem, leading to employee confusion and friction with processes and policies. The travel team felt burdened by process issues and controls that they had little responsibility for yet impacted the effective management of travel spend. This disconnect created obstacles in managing Meetings & Events (M&E) spend, influencing employee behaviours which affected compliance and overall cash flow. The client needed solutions that could optimise different forms of payment to exceed employee expectations balanced with appropriate controls and policies set out by the organisation.
FESTIVE ROAD utilized its Strategic Travel Payments Assessment (STPA) to review the client’s travel and payment landscape focusing upon the four key pillars of Policy, Process, Product and People. We also advised on a range of existing and future forms of payment and the critical system integrations involved in complex expense management and reconciliation processes.
Key recommendations included mandating or encouraging specific forms of payment, creating soft and hard approvals as a critical control mechanism, centralising reconciliation processes to improve visibility, drive control and reduce the burden of itemised reconciliations of travelling employees which would in turn deliver cost savings and ensuring that the recommendations were fully aligned with the travel team’s strategic goals for 2024 and beyond.
Through the implementation of FESTIVE ROAD recommendations, the client realized these key successes:
These outcomes led to improved compliance, streamlined processes and greater employee satisfaction. The partnership also unlocked additional financial benefits, such as rebates from payment suppliers and stronger negotiations and relationships with vendors. By optimising their payment and expense strategies, the client achieved greater efficiency and visibility across their Travel & Events-related expenses.
“The results and recommendations from the strategy project gave us exactly the roadmap needed to determine next steps and the changes needed. We are all about thinking big and the assessment approach enabled us to do that for payments.”
“It was a privilege to facilitate this client’s journey to create better travel and events payments, improving employee experience and contributing to the organisation’s strategic goals. For this client, the responsibility for payments and expense sat outside of the travel team and we bridged that gap. This fostered a joint understanding to overcome the identified challenges and created opportunities to drive successful outcomes.”
