TripActions Liquid Gives Corporate Travel Management a Mobile Payments Boost
Occasional Dilbert strips deal with corporate travel, and don’t exactly cast things in the most glamorous light. Just ask poor Dilbert, whose company tried valiantly to convince him that soap and cheese were practically the same thing. The reality of corporate travel is that it’s just as rough at the other end, too, as companies try frantically to reconcile spending and figure out just what is and isn’t tax-deductible. Looking to make the various rough spots easier is TripActions, who recently tipped us off about its new TripActions Liquid, a platform designed to help improve corporate travel.
TripActions has landed a $500 million debt facility to help launch its operation, getting backing from Comerica Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Silicon Valley Bank in the process. With that helping out, TripActions’ TripActions Liquid can offer a high-quality experience that allows many common issues to be addressed and problems solved accordingly.
For instance, the TripActions Liquid platform can deliver complete reporting of travel spending, centralizing bookings and payments alike to make reconciliation that much easier. Travel payments can be controlled in real-time-no more gathering receipts after the fact-and approvals can be granted rapidly, ensuring that there won’t be any reimbursement hassles down the line. Everything done and paid for through the system is approved. This not only smoothes things out for the end user, but also for the traveler, who now knows exactly what will and won’t go through.
Simplifying travel is a welcome tool for those who engage in business travel, and despite years’ worth of advances in telecommunications and telepresence systems, the need for business travel is still present. Some things still need to be said face-to-face-anyone who’s tried networking online knows that it can be troublesome at best-and that makes travel a necessity. TripActions’ plan to simplify travel down to the mobile payments-level should make it a worthwhile addition to the field and bring plenty of interest along with it.
It will be interesting to see how much favor this can garner in a few months, especially with the coronavirus problems making travel dicey right now. Still, it’s got a good thing going for it; how much hay it can make on a cloudy day remains to be seen.