Fintech Startup Brex Reboots Its Corporate Travel Platform

25.08.2023 - 13:59 / skift.com / Matthew Parsons

Financial services company Brex is relaunching its travel booking platform after swapping agency partners.

Brex Travel, a new full-service travel management offering, is being plugged into its spend management platform Empower, which launched in 2022.

Technology startup Spotnana will power the bank’s new venture, after recently revealing it is backing new agency Travel Solutions. As a result, Brex is ending a previous partnership with TravelBank, which was recently acquired by U.S. Bancorp.

“For the last few years, we’ve enjoyed providing Brex an innovative travel platform to help their corporate customers book flights and hotels,” said Duke Chung, co-founder and CEO of TravelBank. “After being acquired by U.S. Bancorp — with its robust corporate card program and our work together delivering all-in-one travel, expense management, and payment solutions — it made sense for both companies to evolve their respective business models.”

Brex is already notifying its customers of the transition.

Banks are increasingly bolting on travel services as an extra means of keeping customers happy. Citi has just relaunched its own travel platform with Booking.com, while Capital One continues to grow its partnership with Hopper. New entrants Ramp and Pleo are also making inroads into combining travel management with digital banking.

California-headquartered Brex now aims to convert its corporate banking customers into travel customers as well. Its Empower platform already lets clients manage cards and expenses, so thinks it’s a perfect fit.

“A lot of customers wanted a centralized booking tool so you could enforce policy at the time of the search, provide duty of care and a lot of other features,” said Henrique Dubugras, co-founder and co-CEO of Brex. “So we decided to build Brex Travel, and integrated with Brex, so with the same app you can do your corporate cards, your expenses and your travel in one single place.”

It claims it has two main advantages over traditional travel agencies: better visibility over all the travel costs, and more freedom to manage policies. However, many agencies would argue they’re already offering that.

Navan (formerly TripActions), for example started offering cards in 2020 for this very reason, including automated receipt collection and pre-approvals, removing the need for employees to manually fill out expense reports.

But Dubugras said Brex was also standing out because of Spotnana’s range of content. “TripActions and Concur are the number one and two places we’re taking customers from,” he said. “The main thing we hear has to do with the inventory. It’s unbiased inventory. We don’t take any commissions, there’s no incentive for us to not show you the best inventory all the time.”

Acco