Taking Control of Costs: New Tech Makes Business Spend Management Easier

For corporates, the goal, especially in the current inflationary environment, is to squeeze margins higher. There are two levers to pull, ideally working simultaneously: increasing sales momentum, and being judicious on costs.

On that latter endeavor — spend management — companies and platforms are using platforms, and payment instruments to automate and control and digitize the operating expenses that keep the lights on and the inventory in place … right down to the staples and computers on employees’ desks.

Several announcements the past few weeks come from firms using artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced data to help businesses keep costs in control.

Automating those back-office functions of course, is no easy task, and if an enterprise sought to go it alone, there’d be a cobbling together of software, spreadsheets and the hope that (real-time) data might be accessible.

As PYMNTS Intelligence noted last year, the global value of virtual card transactions is expected to grow from about $2 trillion to hit $6.8 trillion by 2026, indicating a growing recognition of their simplicity and security compared to outdated methods like paper checks. We found that 55% of firms were using virtual cards more frequently.

Virtual card adoption, as determined in a separate PYMNTS report, can improve financial results. We found that firms not using virtual cards experience an average revenue loss of 4.6% from payment uncertainties.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Previse founder and CEO Paul Christensen said, “We think virtual cards are really at a tipping point.” He estimated that virtual cards are used to satisfy only 2% of accounts payable transactions. Move the needle just a bit — by, say, a percentage point or two — and that means hundreds of billions of dollars in B2B spending could become more efficient in terms of cash flow visibility, transparency and certainty.

“There are trillions of dollars that are going to move to virtual cards in the next two, three, four, five years,” he added.

In terms of the various platform approaches, and a series of announcements in that space, we reported that Paylocity plans to create a consolidated platform for spend management as it acquired Airbase. The acquisition will add Airbase’s finance and spend management software solution to Paylocity’s human resources (HR) and payroll software platform, Paylocity said last week.

And last month, spend management company Coupa said it has added more than 100 AI-powered innovations to its platform.

With a specific emphasis on payments and working capital, Corpay, a FLEETCOR brand, has launched a spend management platform that aims to simplify corporate payments and spending into a mobile-ready solution.

Also in August, Galileo Financial Technologies said it now enables its FinTech clients to connect their business customers to Mastercard’s expense reporting and analytics suite, Mastercard Smart Data.

The offering allows businesses to better manage their corporate expenses by integrating detailed transactional data directly from Mastercard, Galileo said. With access to Mastercard Smart Data via FinTechs, businesses can automatically ingest detailed purchase information into their enterprise resource planning (ERP) or expense management systems.