SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Coupa Software, the world’s leading provider of cloud-based spend management solutions, today announced plans to modernize business travel with the acquisition of New York-based travel technology company TripScanner, Inc. With this acquisition, Coupa expands its industry-leading Expense Management solution and simplifies business travel management by bringing greater freedom to travel booking.
Business travel is one of the largest indirect expenses for many organizations, reaching $1.2 trillion globally in 2014, according to the Global Business Travel Association. In the U.S., unmanaged travel spend accounts for nearly 25 percent of online booking, which is about $36 billion, according to an article published June 2015 in Business Travel News. Unmanaged travel, also known as “open travel” or “open booking,” is the concept of allowing business travelers to independently manage their own travel without having to go through a travel management company or associated travel management website.
TripScanner’s innovative open booking technology bridges the gap between employees’ booking habits and corporate business policies, providing enterprises with the best of both worlds. The solution gives employees the freedom to book travel anywhere while providing the automated control and visibility their employer needs to reign in travel spend and report on traveler locations.
“Travel preferences and booking options are a personal experience for most people. Many employees traveling on business today want to maintain the same autonomy they have when booking personal travel,” said Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa. “Our goal with this acquisition is to drive greater compliance and deliver on our mission of savings-as-a-service for our customers, all while delighting their employees. This acquisition is another step towards that goal.”
Modernizing Business Travel Management to Transform Unmanaged Travel
TripScanner’s open booking solution was designed to intersect the emerging need for greater employee autonomy in booking business travel with the constant need for enterprises to control travel spend and maintain visibility into employee travel. As more companies today recognize the benefits of providing employees with greater travel flexibility, TripScanner’s capabilities make it easy for employees to book travel through the sites they already know and love, including flight, hotel, car rental, ground transportation and rail reservations made through any website, app, or travel agency.
TripScanner automatically reviews travel itineraries, helping ensure compliance with company travel policies and auto-creating line items in employee expense reports that save time and increase employee productivity.
For travel managers, the TripScanner solution greatly increases transparency within an organization by providing real-time reporting, analytics and forecasting on enterprise-wide travel. Businesses can more easily support the safety of their employees no matter where in the world they travel.
“We launched TripScanner to transform the way companies handle the realities of unmanaged travel. As the modern world continues to disrupt legacy ways of conducting business travel, a tremendous opportunity exists to deliver increased travel compliance and savings to customers,” said Ethan Laub, founder and CEO of TripScanner. “We are excited to bring our travel and expense automation expertise to Coupa and are thrilled at the opportunity to help customers increase their quantifiable results when using Coupa Travel and Expense management.”
Extending the Value of Coupa’s Expense Management Solution
Coupa’s existing cloud-based Expense Management solution makes expense management easy for both users and the back office. Employees benefit by having a virtual personal assistant that automatically predicts expenses, provides one-click expense line creation, removes paper receipt handling, decreases reimbursement time and easily collects traveler information such as acceptance of personal vehicle usage policy. Accounts Payable teams benefit by spending less time processing paper receipts or tracking down and investigating employee expenses and gain powerful reporting and analytics capabilities.
To further increase business value to customers, and drive even more meaningful visibility and control from an expense management application that employees actually love using, Coupa plans to boost its Travel and Expense Management offering by organically incorporating TripScanner’s innovations into the Coupa platform. Coupa expects that new updates to its Expense Management solution will be made available to select customers by the end of 2015.
As part of the acquisition, the TripScanner team will bring their extensive travel and expense domain expertise to Coupa and will join the company to continue developing their creative vision to solve travel and expense challenges in the enterprise.
Coupa Advantage Program Expansion
The Coupa Advantage program, which leverages the collective buying power of the Coupa platform to deliver significant savings and exceptional contract terms to Coupa customers, will be expanded to include travel categories to the more than 20 spend categories available to participating Coupa customers today. The TripScanner team will work with the Coupa Advantage team to increase the pre-negotiated travel savings potential for the collective benefit of Coupa customers.
About Coupa Software
Coupa Software is the leading provider of cloud-based spend management applications. More than 500 customers in over 40 countries, including Sanofi, Salesforce.com, BNP Paribas North America, NEC, Royal Bank of Canada, Swiss Re, and Highmark Health use the Coupa suite of financial applications to support business agility and reduce costs. Coupa provides a suite of true cloud applications for finance, including accounts payable, sourcing, procurement, e-invoicing, and travel and expense management, which allows customers to realize a return on their investment within a few months and savings that continually impact the bottom line. Learn more at www.coupa.com. Read more on the Coupa Blog or follow @Coupa on Twitter.
