It’s clear that the pandemic accelerated digital transformation among global businesses. Among these developments was a re-evaluation of how businesses pay their suppliers. This has presented an opportunity for B2B payments providers and AP automation vendors to deliver easy-to-use, seamless, unified experiences.
One area of significant digitalization was in the business travel and corporate events space. Corporate preferences have begun to align with everyday consumer payments experiences. It is in this space that we saw developments in web and mobile payments. These include significant interest in virtual payments and expense management platforms.
American Express Partners with Cvent
With this background, it comes to no surprise that American Express recently announced a partnership with Cvent, a corporate meetings, events, and hospitality provider, to further expand virtual payment capabilities within Cvent’s Event Marketing & Management platform.
Included in the announcement were results from the American Express Meeting & Events Trendex survey conducted in September of this year. The survey found that 81% of corporate event & meeting planners are using an automated payments process and 82% expect further automation of these processes within the next six months.
Expense Management Platform Experience
Furthermore, the top ranked feature that planners were looking for in an expense management platform was a simple user experience (50%) followed by enhanced security (48%). Mercator conducted a study on expense management platforms, similarly, finding that ease-of-use and security were important factors to corporate stakeholders.
As corporate buyers, and suppliers come to alignment on the important features of virtual payments, we expect continued expansion of this novel payment’s method.
Overview by Ben Danner, Research Analyst at Mercator Advisory Group.
