AirPlus and Coupa team up for business spend management
As business travel resumes post-pandemic, spend management tech vendors are partnering with commercial payments companies to offer integrated products.
In such, business spend management company Coupa Software has joined hands with travel payments management company, AirPlus. Under this partnership, the AirPlus Virtual Cards Procurement will be a payment option within Coupa’s B2B payments solution, Coupa Pay.
Clients of AirPlus and Coupa would be able to streamline and centralize spending across areas like travel, business resources and utilities. As per the press note, this would also provide clients with ‘new levels of value and business insight, empowering them to simplify, digitize, and automate their purchasing processes in a seamless, integrated system’ while customers would be able to generate virtual cards directly on Coupa Pay.
“Through the integration of payment options like the AirPlus Virtual Cards Procurement, companies can optimize business spend in a simple and seamless experience”, said Roger Goulart, executive vice president of Business Development and Alliances at Coupa.
Last year, Coupa and HSBC teamed up to offer virtual cards while American Express and Coupa expanded their partnership in the US.
As noted in the press release, AirPlus works in virtual cards since 2005 and the company’s focus was on travel expense management, the company is now increasingly active in other purchasing processes as well. It was introduced last year for purchases and to execute this, a Mastercard credit card number is generated.
The company makes a claim that teaming up with Coupa, marks an important step under which the company is establishing itself as a provider for procurement expenses other than business travel.
Coupa is a cloud-based Business Spend Management (BSM) platform that unifies processes across the supply chain, procurement, and finance functions while AirPlus is a solutions provider in the corporate payments segment and it is an issuer under UATP and Mastercard schemes.
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