New app builds on the momentum of the company’s rapidly expanding Empower platform
With business travel picking up all over the world now that most borders have reopened, fintech company Brex has officially entered the travel space with the announcement of Brex Travel. The new app includes booking and management capabilities via the Brex dashboard and mobile app, with global inventory, self-service trip changes, and 24/7 customer support.
For context, Brex is a global spend platform that integrates corporate cards, expense management, reimbursements, bill payments, and travel on its platform. The app allows finance teams and founders to manage global spend at scale while helping employees track their expenses. The company currently serves tens of thousands of businesses, from enterprises to startups.
Brex Travel builds on the momentum of the company’s Empower platform. Since launching in 2022, Empower has experienced rapid growth, onboarding hundreds of thousands of employees globally, and used by companies like DoorDash, Coinbase, Indeed, and Superhuman.
One of the main goals of Brex Empower’s management system is to allow finance teams to create budgets and policies to manage travel across the entire company. Brex Travel enables finance teams to roll out customized travel budgets across an organization, enabling individuals and teams to book travel compliant with spend policies.
Brex has also partnered with Spotnana to build its travel capabilities from the ground up on top of Spotnana’s cloud-based Travel-as-a-Service platform.
The gap in the travel market that Brex is tackling is a disjointed employer-employee ecosystem when it comes to tracking expenses.
Brex is also providing employees with a self-serve solution to book and manage trips. Automated receipt capture and approvals drive higher compliance and real-time visibility for finance teams. Live budgets allow them to proactively provision and track spend in real time to keep everyone accountable, within policy and on budget.
The idea is that, when all trip expenses are managed in the same budget, there is real-time visibility into how spend is trending, giving leaders the ability to manage travel spend proactively, putting travel dollars to where they have the most impact.
Another important aspect of Brex Travel is its global inventory, which it calls unbiased, because it is not impacted by commissions, a common practice in the business travel industry. This gives companies access to preferred rates, and includes global distribution system (GDS) fares, direct API integrations with airlines, basic economy seats, local and low-cost airlines (often left out of most travel systems), as well as hotels and car rentals in all major countries.
From an adoption perspective, this reduces the need to book travel outside of the system, increasing adoption and improving policy compliance. With automatic approval of expenses that are in policy, managers can focus on the exceptions while employees book their flights, swipe their card at restaurants, and check out from the hotel. And, a modern UI and mobile app increases employee adoption, helping keep travel in policy and in budget.
“Most employees find it hard to comply because they don’t know what the policy is, and it takes a lot of effort to collect receipts and memos for every purchase,” said Henrique Dubugras, co-Founder and co-CEO of Brex. “With Brex travel, you can easily see the right policy on the mobile app at the time of booking, and we automate receipt collection, memos and approvals on trips.”
(Image courtesy of Brex)
