What’s the thinking behind this alliance and why now?

Charlie Sultan, President, Concur Travel
We all know the industry’s been evolving really rapidly. Actually it’s been accelerating. We continue to see more vertical integration, more challenges of content fragmentation. And I think what we’re going to see in the future, as well the criticality of robust complete data, which is going to make the unified solutions more and more valuable to customers, to travellers and to suppliers.

And as you know, we’ve re-platformed Concur Travel. We’ve heard very positive feedback from customers about the consumer-like experience, the content, the AI capabilities. But the reality is that as we went about transitioning customers from the legacy Concur Travel to the new Concur Travel, it really became apparent that one of the most critical blockers to moving faster was the fact that we had to work with so many different TMCs. And each of these TMCS were in different systems. They each wanted to spend time planning, testing, certifying, validating, and then we were convincing them to migrate customers. We saw the customers were frustrated because they were hearing us talk about cool new things but their TMC wasn’t making those available yet.

We realised that we need to move faster and that it’s difficult to do that as only one part of the ecosystem. So we needed to do that with a partner. We’re going to continue to support other TMC partners and continue to innovate on the new Concur Travel platform, we’re going to continue the existing system of other TMC resellers, allowing them to sell and service, but we’re also changing the game really to strengthen our position and our offerings with customers in combination with Amex GBT.

“We really believe that by building the future together we can offer customers an even more comprehensive solution, delivering the end-to-end value across travel expense, payments, servicing, and we can do it a lot faster with Amex GBT.

Evan Konwiser, Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Amex GBT
From the Amex GBT perspective, it’s parallel with what Charlie has said and I think that’s why this makes so much sense. We’ve been looking at the industry for a long time and recognising that these are the things our customers are asking for. This is what they need. And as we think about the direction of travel on marketplace and content fragmentation, we think about how AI is changing the landscape and the opportunities, and we look at what we need to do over the next 5-10 years, we have to be joined up to solve this these problems for our customers and lead the way.

Doing it in the way that the last 20 years have evolved is not going to cut it. This is a really exciting opportunity for us to work with SAP concur on this journey on designing for speed, designing to solve customer problems, delivering the customer experience, bringing unified data across travel expense and payments for frictionless experiences, building the AI-centric infrastructure that’s going to lead to the experiences of tomorrow, which are going to happen much faster than I think a lot of people are thinking.

I’m wiring in content at pace so that customers have what they need and our supply partners also are getting the opportunity to merchandise their content in the way that they need to and ultimately working with our customers as one unit. There will be no more “Concur is over there, Amex GBT is over there”. Customers can talk to us as a unit, we deploy as a unit, we support as a unit, and we know that that’s incredibly important for our customers, for their experience, but also to deliver on this ambitious road map.

Between our Egencia integration with Concur Expense and the ‘Complete’ solution I think we’re going to turn a lot of heads. I think we’re checking a lot of boxes that we’ve heard from customers repeatedly about what they’re looking for and where they see things going.

We’ve been partners with SAP Concur for a long time, but it hasn’t been a framework that’s allowed us to do this right. This is about building together a solution that really brings all of the architecture of your programme into one unit. And I think that is a huge unlock that our customers will benefit greatly from.

Fred Fredericks, SVP, Chief Product Officer, and Head of Engineering at SAP Concur
Concur and Amex GBT have been partners for a very long time – about 20 years. In fact, I was there when we did the first GBT reseller agreement, but GBT is not just a TMC. It’s also a true software company that offers numerous solutions and so they get it. They understand what it takes to build software. They understand. GBT also has a very comprehensive travel marketplace. The ability to bring that content to our joint customers, globally, is really important, and combing the booking, servicing payments, expensing into one experience.

AI needs data and SAP has the richest set of business data in the world, so we will  take all that SAP business data and the data that GBT has. The ability to deliver AI here can be industry leading. And then, as Evan said, we will be able to deal with the content fragmentation and get solutions to customers quickly in a way that can give the customers and travellers what they need.

Another key part of this is alliance is integrating Concur Expense with Egencia. We have thousands of Concur Expense customers that don’t need the sophistication of Concur Travel and don’t have a heavily managed travel programme, but we will be able to bring Egencia to those customers and deliver that marketplace and all the value that we have in Concur Expense.

You will have a dedicated team to drive the joint development. How will this be structured and funded?

Evan
We will be using our existing teams and also hiring new people. This is about putting resources and talent across our organisations to work together on this and and absolutely it’s about adding new resources and hiring new resources and new talent into the businesses. We’ve established a joint product team with engineering collaboration and product collaboration to build together.

Fred
We’ve already hired people on the Concur side and we will continue to hire people. It is an add-on, so we did not cannibalise our existing team. We’ll have a dedicated travel and expense team for Complete that works very closely with product engineering user experience at GBT, and have been working closely for some time.

What’s the timing of the roll-out? Is there anything available to clients right now? Have you been testing the product with any customers?

Fred
Nobody’s got it now. The first customers will be able to turn it on later this month. Later this month, the first customers will be able to choose to move and we’ll be more aggressively moving customers next month. It’s a button click. They don’t have to do anything to upgrade.

We have a new mobile app, a new web app and there’s some new hotel content that we’re bringing out later this month. And then there will be some other events happening in October where we will launch more functionality that’s coming soon, and we will be publishing shortly after that a public road map for Complete that’s in addition to the road map for Concur Travel and Expense.

So, you haven’t yet told any clients about this new alliance?

Charlie
We’ve talked to two or three customers to get a check from them, to get a level of excitement and figure out from them what they want us to work on together. But for the most part, yes, this is the announcement going out now to let everybody know this is coming.

Will it be rolled out in the US first?

The US, the UK – the countries where we operate together and where we have the most massive customers together – will all roll out pretty much over a period of a few weeks in November. And the Concur expense integration into Amex GBT Egencia will be completed by the end of 2025.

Evan
Until now Amex GBT has only had small scale expense solutions. I’d say what we’ve done in that space has been pretty limited. This is really a decision to build expense with SAP Concur.

Now that Amex GBT is your ‘preferred’ or ‘flagship’ TMC, what does this mean for your other TMC partners, particularly for your ‘Elite’ partners such as BCD and FCM?

Fred
We will maintain our reseller and fulfilment partnerships that we have for Concur Travel and customers get choice. If they want to go with a different TMC, they can. But I think that when we’re out there saying is the Complete is Concur’s flagship product and the way that we market other TMCS will change. GBT will be our preferred partner from a TMC perspective. But customers will be able to use Concur Travel and Expense and we’ll continue innovating on those products. Again, we didn’t take anything away from the innovation capacity on those products.

So, your other TMC partners should not be concerned that your focus is on Amex GBT?

Charlie
I think there are two things to say here. First and foremost, Concur Travel is the leader and the newest booking tool and it’s integrated into the leading expense tool and so the products that they (the TMCs) are currently reselling is fantastic. It’s the best product in the market and we’re going to continue to innovate on that. And so if they and their customers were excited to use that, they’re just going to continue to be more and more excited going forward.

The other point that I would make is American Express was actually one of the key investors and Board members in Concur during the largest period of our growth and that growth happened across all TMCs. And so simply the fact that we’re doing something special with somebody else does not detract from what we continue to build and do together with them (other TMCs).

What about the ‘Elite’ and ‘Select’ level TMC partnership levels that you currently have?

Charlie
What you’ll see us doing going forward is just collapsing all of those tiers for the most part. And so this ‘Complete’ product is going to get incremental investment to make sure that we are continuously innovating. Some of those tiers will just go away, but the TMCs’ ability to continue to resell and service Concur will not go away.

What about Neo? Will Amex GBT continue to invest in that?

Evan
Yes, this is incremental to Neo. Neo will continue to be the solution that it is and we will continue to drive it forward. This is all in in addition to NEO.

Amex GBT is now starting the integration of CWT. Is this a good time to be embarking on this new project?

Evan
Yes, the timing is perfect. Since the closing of the CWT acquisition, we have thousands of new customers and we want to show them the kinds of experiences and solutions we can provide.

Amex GBT has built its value proposition on a choice of solutions that deliver customers exactly what they want and it’s going to be an extremely attractive opportunity for our CWT customers. We’re excited to work with them and listen to what they’re telling us about what they want, and we are confident that we are going to work with them to drive a lot of value, and this will be one of the places that will do that.

So although the timing was certainly not designed that way, we think it’s an incredibly important opportunity to deliver for those customers as well.