American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) recently released findings from a survey of finance leaders conducted by Neo, Amex GBT’s integrated travel and expense management platform. The online survey was conducted of 1,202 finance managers in companies with more than 5,000 employees, across the U.S., U.K., France and Germany.
A new world of work, and expenses
The study finds that new hybrid working models and the current economic landscape are significantly impacting the way large businesses approach travel and expenses (T&E). More than 90% say it has affected the process in some way. More scrutiny on expenses and more rapidly made claims (both at 41%) vie for top spot of impacts of hybrid work. A large majority of finance managers (69%) expect to see an increase in fraudulent claims being made because of the current economic situation.
Some things haven’t changed: T&E is still seen as a necessary cost by 57% of respondents, and 40% see it as a key enabler to their company’s growth, similar to results reported by Neo in 2019. However, cost cutting is flying up the priority list for businesses, and 76% of finance teams agree that expense policies could be used to cut costs without cutting travel.
‘Intervention-free’ T&E as a driver for employee satisfaction
As a result, large businesses are turning to advanced digital solutions to speed up and improve the accuracy and reliability of expense management.
Nearly 90% of finance decision makers say they trust AI to support T&E management, and more than one-third (34%) even trust it to detect issues without any human intervention. In fact, the majority (65%) of those asked expect T&E to become intervention-free in the future.
The top two reasons finance managers would be swayed to change T&E management are a better employee user experience (nearly one-third) and faster end-to-end processing time (26%). A sharp focus on employee engagement is also clear with over one-third of respondents (36%) claiming it is one of their highest priorities for 2023, just behind cost control (45%).
Meaningful and responsible travel will be of higher priority than balance sheet.
Looking ahead, priorities for finance decision makers are set to shift even further beyond cost savings. For example, 64% of respondents said the amount of carbon emitted during a business trip would be considered more important than how much it costs. Meanwhile, 71% agreed that using travel to strengthen relationships would also be more important than lower costs.
“Businesses are not shying away from technology and integrated booking and expense systems to help them drive compliance in their travel programs,” said Sebastien Bardin, Neo’s VP of Product.
More insight on the Neo expense management survey is available here.
