Josh Abich

I am the Chief Revenue Officer here at TravelBank. So I’ve got the ultimate responsibility of serving our customers across marketing sales and customer success. I have a personal and professional passion of building high performing teams that thrive on solving our customer’s business problems. So thanks again for the opportunity to have this discussion with you all and look forward to it.

Tory Passons

I’m Tory Passons. I’m a product manager at US Bank. I work in the corporate payments division. I primarily work on partnerships and new product development and ideally where those two things come together is where I love to live my life. Thus, I’m trying to be customers where they’re at on the platforms they’re in like TravelBank instead of forcing them to our platforms, that US Bank. I’ve been in product for a while. I feel like it’d been in product before a product was a thing and even in product in financial services for at least 10 years. It’s been a fun journey and working with partners like TravelBank has been really fun. I’m excited to be here today and, tell you what we’ve got going.

Tiffany Mast

Thanks TorY. Today. We’re going to discuss how the commercial payments landscape has changed and the benefits of adopting a virtual card setup will address not only how the commercial payments landscape is changing, but what that means for your business, how companies are solving commercial payments challenges with virtual cards, the benefits of adopting a virtual card for your company, and some predictions from our subject experts for the future of payments. How has the commercial payments landscape changed?

Tory Passons

Virtual cards are at the center of the change happening in the payments industry. And so as it shifts, I just want to get a real basic level understanding here on this call. What, what we are talking about when we say virtual card first ultimately, it’s a car that has no plastic, it’s a corporate credit card. It can have a 16-digit credit card number or can be tokenized. I’ll talk about that here in a second. And it can be set up for a short period of time for one day for a very specific amount. And it can have MCC controls in place so much like a corporate credit card with plastic can have those MCC controls in place.

Tory Passons

You can do the same with virtual credit cards. And so, we’ve been pushing virtual credit cards for over 10 years at US Bank. Although they seem to be much more prominent now as they move down market. And so, especially with COVID hitting, which we’ll talk about that too, but beyond just pushing that 16-digit credit card number and CVB, so you can make a purchase with it. We can also push the token. So, if you think about a tokenized cards with chips that you dip in a point-of-sale device it’s that same technology that now we can push from one individual to the other so I can push it to Josh. He can put it in his mobile wallet and then he can do either he can see the cart number if he wants to see it or needs to see it, or he can just use his device at point of sale. So, I bring this up because this technology and the progression of the technology is very important to the future of payments and the pivot in payments, especially for what happened in 2020. It’s been really interesting to watch.

Tory Passons

To the next slide. This is also really interesting to me. It’s a little cavalier to when you first look at it, but you’ll notice if you focus in on 2020 corporate card spend in commercial credit, went down in 2020. That’s no big surprise to anyone. Corporate travel stopped completely, but what’s interesting is virtual card spend went up and so in virtual card spend is trending up. It was trending up even pre COVID. Now it’s being accelerated.

Tory Passons

At that acceleration by 2024, we’re looking at 414 billion in spend versus 177 in just 2019. It’s a rapid growth COVID is definitely pushing that growth and creating change in the market. So obviously a lot of spend moving towards virtual cards and it’s actually overtaking P card in 2021. US Bank was the first issuing bank to come out with the P card. So now it’s, it’s fun to watch our virtual cards overtake our P card program, frankly, and it’s been changing a lot and COVID has been really I almost said helping with that change, but I would say forcing some of that change to happen.

Tory Passons

As I look at that in my own personal life, I know I stopped doing the stores that don’t accept mobile payment because I have my cards on my phone. And so if it’s a hardware store or grocery store, or even the gas stations by my house now are starting to take mobile payment. And so I am personally going to merchants where I don’t have to touch the point of sale device after last March, March, 2020. I think we all got very aware of how many things we touched once we left the house and that includes payment. And so I’ve made that change. The industry is also making that change. People were stuck at home quickly for corporations, and they had to make purchases with their personal cards and then try to get reimbursed from their companies. So our phones started ringing off the hook saying I have to sneak people into the office to cut paper checks, to mail them, to people who are using personal cards.

Tory Passons

And this just is not functionally working, way too many touch points. How do we fix this? And we did work towards a solve that we’ll talk about here in a minute, but that pain point was it driving force to a new product — we brought out two. But ultimately trying to make it seamless for customers; so they don’t have to come in contact with point of sale devices, as well as solve for the reconciliation challenge or reimbursement challenge that happens when you have that much paper involved and personal card spend involved. So it’s been a really interesting shift so I can use mobile and contactless payments interchangeably a lot. So I want to pause on that for a moment and just give you a description of what I mean. So mobile payment is when you can put your corporate card or your personal card, frankly, in your mobile wallet versus contactless payment, you usually pointed towards plastic where you can just bring the plastic near the point of sale device.

Tory Passons

It’s the same technology through the tokenization of the card, communicating with the point of sale. And so regardless if you’re using that plastic or your mobile being contactless is important in a COVID world or post COVID world. And it’s looking to triple the payments in by 2024 to 6 trillion, that’s just a huge number from 2 trillion in 2020, over 50% of Americans are already using contactless payments. So we’re being trained. We’ve been trained for a couple of years now, I’m on the plastic and it’s moving to mobile. And how do to use contactless point of sale devices and things like phones and, plastic, as well as small businesses are reporting a spike in contactless payments, not dimension US Bank, sister, company, Elba merchant services. We ship point of sale devices, or they do. And over 95% of the point of sale devices that they ship are now contactless enabled BD, either mobile or contactless card. So quite a trend happening in an acceleration happening because of the events in 2020.

Tiffany Mast

Thanks, Tory. That’s great insight. Now that we have a better understanding of the changing landscape let’s discuss, how are virtual cards solving commercial payment challenges. Josh, would you like to take this one first?

Josh Abich

Thanks Tiffany. I would summarize from what we see, three main challenges that TravelBank and US Bank are collectively solving. Number one, I would say is, fraud reduction. By simply having a personal card out there, whether intentional or not, this is an area of absolute risk, for the company. If you have personal cards out there. So simply by consolidating into corporate card and virtual cards specifically, we believe you’ll see a reduction in fraud. Number two you’ll gain more control and visibility to spend. Again, with a mix of personal cards and corporate cards, our customers are telling us that it’s very hard for the finance and accounting teams to simply keep track of companies fed. On top of that. Tory mentioned reconciliation. It’s a process that I’m not super familiar with, but for all of our accounting friends out there, we know that it’s a difficult process.

Josh Abich

By consolidating a corporate card alongside travel and expense management into one platform, we’re helping companies save a lot of time in the reconciliation process. Third, and there’s probably a ton of use cases behind the user experience. But number three, I would say we simply help provide a better employee experience. There’s countless use cases. Again, one that comes to mind in the travel business is a problem that’s been, I would say unsolved in the industry for some time, which has many employees. The majority of employees simply do not have a corporate card. And some companies have been on board with a virtual card, but in the case of booking travel, if a company books travel for an employee and they simply don’t have the corporate card, it is not a very fun process for that employee to check in at a hotel, for example.

Josh Abich

So without the actual physical card, believe it or not, there’s still a lot of faxing that’s going on, even though it’s 2021. So a fax has to go to the hotel. The hotel has to verify the transaction. If the fax isn’t there, I can tell you, it’s not a very fun process for that employee just to simply check in. So with the virtual payment and virtual card, just right from the mobile wallet, as Tory mentioned, the employee can simply just check in at the hotel very seamlessly. And we’re going to talk about how simple that process is to manage. So that’s one big use case. Another one is simply many employees out there have to float expenses if they’re are, if they’re using their personal card, which as you know, many employees are simply living paycheck to paycheck. And so having to float these expenses typically does not provide the greatest experience and they have to wait for the company to reimburse them. Let’s say the company has a great reimbursement process. Typically it takes a several weeks for that employee to be reimbursed. And again, for some employees, it’s simply just too long. So virtual cards solve this problem just by simply giving access to the employee to make a purchase. The company still has a significant amount of control and visibility to that process. And that’s what we want to talk to you a little bit more about.

Tiffany Mast

So Tory us quickly recognized the potential of a thoughtful virtual corporate card. Can you tell us a little bit more about that product

Tory Passons

As I move into that too, I’m just pausing for a moment. And I want to, you said Josh around fax machines. I think it’s interesting that they are still in motion and a lot of people are probably surprised to hear you even say it, but really it’s hotels keeping to is in production today because of the process you’re talking about, it was a difficult solve in the past before you could push a virtual card through tokenization and really adoption was low by hotels because there wasn’t a big need for it. Hotels are quickly adopting this concept of contactless payment. I’ve traveled three times since COVID hit personally. And I know it’s a small data point, but all three times I could check in without ever giving them my plastic card.

Tory Passons

That’s rare pre COVID. I was traveling three times a month and I would say maybe one in 10, I could use it because I always try to just to test the market. So it’s been fun to watch that shift too, because of the technology behind it. I’m talking about instinct card, going back to the pain that I mentioned of companies, having their employees go work from home. They didn’t want to give them a corporate card, but they need to spend the reconciliation challenge trying to, and reimbursement challenge tried to get them checks. We built in 2020 really as quick as we could, after the phones started ringing was this concept of instant card. And we also did this along with TravelBank, integrating the data at the same time. Customers could have that feed on Josh, talk to you a little bit about that integration here in a minute, but the solve for the pain. If you can go to the next slide, Tiffany thinks this is what instant card does. So it allows me to push Josh a card in real time. I can control the credit.

Tory Passons

The expiration date, and I can push it to him whenever he needs it. So it also has MCC controls, like I mentioned for normal virtual cards, but this one’s a little different because once he downloads the app, the card is already in the app. He can see the card number and CVV and expiration date to make his purchase. He can add it to his mobile wallet with a simple tap. And he gets green path every time because it’s a US Bank issuing card to a US Bank app being instant card. And when I say green path, I mean, he doesn’t have to call one 800 number to verify. He doesn’t have to do copy and paste to get it into his wallet. It’s just a very simple add to wallet via a Google pay or Apple pay. And the controls in place are phenomenal.

Tory Passons

So it could be for a day. It can be for five days can be for a hundred dollars or $10,000. And to be able to do that seamlessly has really helped our customers deal with this challenge of not just employees at home, but also contractors in the field that need to make a purchase. There’s a lot of use cases where you don’t want plastic floating around, and I’m glad you brought that up about fraud. There’s almost no fraud Josh, as you know, associated with virtual cards, because if you think about it, it’s a moment in time when the card is valid for a certain credit limit, sometimes it’s for one purchase only. And so the controls, and it can be controlled down to just a few MCC thus, you couldn’t use it for travel, but you can use it to buy your widget or your company. That’s really combating fraud for them to try to get to that card in that moment and use it is very, very difficult as smart as they are. So that’s really helpful having the controls in place and the lack of fraud. So it’s a really simple app that allows all these positives to happen. And then we’ve done a bunch of work with TravelBank in parallel to make it even better.

Tiffany Mast

Thanks, Tory. Josh, can you tell us a little bit about how the company benefits from adopting instant card with TravelBank?

Josh Abich

I’m happy to, I’m looking at the real questions too. We had, we had one come in, which is very on topic, which is, are we seeing patterns in how companies are using virtual cards for like, what are they using it for? And we, and we do see some consistency. It’d be great to Tory if you could weigh in on this. But number one, I would say in the COVID time we see in a number of our customers use instant card, for employee work from home benefits. So instead COVID-19 hit. Instead of saying, all right, let’s rush and send everybody a corporate card, which is a long, really not easy to manage process. And it may not be a process that you want to keep in place in perpetuity companies stopped on TravelBank and US Bank to simply leverage the capability of instant card.

Josh Abich

And within minutes, finance and accounting teams can go into TravelBank and issue out a virtual card with an expiration date and a monthly, if it’s monthly of what our customers decide to use a monthly budget for that employee to take advantage of, I would say, so that’s a top use case, employee stipends, a very similar concept continuing education fund. So many of our healthcare clients are using the card to provide, continuing education funds. Typically it’s been very hard for these customers to track the spend against the budget and to reconcile those expenses. And then the last I would say, which is starting to pick up, believe it or not is a recruitment travel specific to HR. So if you have a candidate coming into travel, how do you manage that process? Do you book them on a P-Card or ghost card? Do you have them, manage the expense on their personal card and then submit for reimbursement? Instead of all those different processes, which could be challenging and take to take too much time, or just not really be user-friendly, I would say those are the four top use cases that we see in leveraging instant card.

Tory Passons

I think those are the primary ones that I’m glad you brought up the stipend one, because that seems to be coming up a lot. So initially it is the work from home, let them buy a monitor, buy some things that they would have to put on their personal cards. Stipends is a good one. We’re hearing that, but as we’ve had, we’ve had dozens of companies, implement this already since going live last August incense, going live. We have heard a lot of them about the travel component in the future saying this is really interesting because if you can integrate into the travel platform, as well as the expense platform like we have with TravelBank, you can solve the end-to-end challenge where you are embedding the card in the total experience. And they get that quickly that now we can send it to someone who’s traveling once a year for the company or recruit that’s coming in.

Tory Passons

And not only can you book their air and hotel with this card, but they can also use it for incidentals like Uber food, coffee, whatever it might be. And that’s why it’s so important. As I keep talking about point-of-sale devices coming online, it’s really important that that keeps happening. So virtual cards can be used a lot more than they are today. The fallback position, we’ll all for a while, be that personal card in their pocket. If for some reason, the point-of-sale device doesn’t accept, but we’re really reducing how much spend employees and non-employees had to put on their own card. So it’s, it’s driving towards that end to end solution. It didn’t start with travel because travel when a way in a, in a heartbeat for all of us, but it’s quickly coming back to travel as we hear from our customers.

Josh Abich

I appreciate the additional perspective. I’m sure our audience does as well. So, so Tiffany, back to your question, how does the company benefit from adopting instant part of a TravelBank? Let me just take a step back and introduce TravelBank, for those who are joining us, who are not too familiar with TravelBank. So we are the leading provider all in one provider of travel expense management and corporate card management capabilities, all in one platform. So number one challenge that we solve for companies is we simply help them save time and money by consolidating three. Typically I would say legacy systems into one beautifully designed, easy to use interface. So think about the benefits of that from the end user perspective if you have three different solutions and I’m sure it’s going to be three different solutions for the end user as well, you have one platform or app or process for booking travel.

Josh Abich

You have a different one for expense management who knows what’s going on with the corporate card. So simply bringing it together, saves a bunch of time. It’s a better employee experience for the finance and accounting teams. This is the big one here is we bring new levels of control and visibility to the entire process end to end from preapproval budgets and policies set forth on the travel and booking side to seeing that card data come all the way through the reconciliation process. Again, all on a single platform, we hear time and time again from our customers, especially if they’re using legacy tools. It’s so hard to get access to the right reports. It’s so challenging to reconcile card data with expenses after they’ve happened and with TravelBank, we simply bring it all together in a very simple and easy to use platform.

Josh Abich

The employee experience is really hits home on two different fronts from an end user, which is really the life I’ve been living for the last 15 years as a sales professional, traveling on the road. It’s just simply as not a great experience to be using a different travel app, a different expense management app, and then to have to go through the process of linking all of your car transactions into the expense report. Matter of fact, as a roadway or myself, I used to wait until the worst wee hour of my day to go through this process because it was so painful. And it’s a big motivating reason why I joined TravelBank in our mission to provide a complete and delightful experience across travel and expense. And that’s really what drives us every single day. So the last user experience part that I mentioned is really for our finance and accounting power users who are in the tools every single day.

Josh Abich

We’re going to show you this in the next slide, but think about going to one place. And really this is what you’re going to see now to manage an instant card inside of TravelBank. What I can do now with virtual cards, if I’m going to finance or accounting professional is I simply log into TravelBank. We already directly connected to US Bank. So within seconds I can assign my employee a card. I can set the expiration date for that card. I can set the limit for that card. And then within a few more seconds, like Tory mentioned, he’s sending me cards.  Tory can go out anywhere and make them make that transaction possible. So instead of having to wait weeks to get the corporate card or to set up a reimbursement process or manage personal expenses on a personal card, I solved the problem by reducing fraud, making it easier for the end user to go make the purchase.

Josh Abich

And then for the finance and accounting teams, you’ve, you’ve basically completed this process within minutes. When those transactions start to come back through, since everything’s already integrated with TravelBank on the expense management side, the card transaction data is already automatically linked to the expense report. So when I go to submit my expense report, whenever done and ready to submit the expense report, all of my card data is there. My transactions are there. My receipts are there and I can submit that expense report within seconds. So really those are the main use cases. And there’s much more, but I think those are the main ones that I’d like you to walk away from this call with.

Tiffany Mast

Thanks, Josh. Let’s talk about some predictions. So I feel like Tory, you might have some great predictions. What do you predict payments will look like in the next year, the next five years, even the next decade,

Tory Passons

I feel like I should put up a slide right now, like a legal disclosure saying US Bank does not share the views on, but to share with you, but I’ll share them anyway from my personal view is because when you start to look five and 10 years out, it’s hard enough to even look at this year within the next 12 months. What can we do with this technology? And then started looking five years out, 10 years out, but it seems to me that plastic’s going to be on the decline over the next five years. And, but the next 10 years, I don’t see a strong use case for having plastic cards in the market. We’ll get more and more control. As we move to a more virtual card contactless payment situation and who knows what the device is going to be. I don’t think it matters.

Tory Passons

It doesn’t have to be a phone. Doesn’t have to be plastic, can be glasses or wearables, but the important thing is going to be the control with the seamless experience of both the frequent spender and infrequent spender. I think about all the information that technology has on me while I travel from your calendar, email from your, travel to expense to the card technology pretty much knows everything about me. Meaning if I go to San Francisco to have dinner with Josh, it’s on my calendar, it’s in my bookings. It knows why I’m there doing what I’m doing. So hypothetically go with me down this rabbit hole for just a second. It should be able to push me a card in real time for the payment. I’m about to make knowing I’m going out to dinner or taking an Uber, whatever it might be.

Tory Passons

It could be a transaction per card. It can be a card per trip, and more importantly, the seamless integration from the transaction already having all the data including receipt right now, we’re, we’re getting used to snapping pictures of receipts and OCR technology extracting the transaction information is really cool and important, but there’s a future state within the next 10 years where receipts are all digital being fed into your transaction and attaching to it automatically. When I say receipts, it’s real line item receipts coming through, not just at a high level. So there’s going to be a tipping point in my mind. And again, going back to point of sale devices where it’s going to be so accepted everywhere that we can really take this technology to the next level and have that seamless experience integrated into a travel and expense platform, which is one thing I love about TravelBank. They have both historically travel and expense platforms. I would say haven’t played real nice together. And so having the end-to-end experience with our card, thank goodness in the middle of it is really fun to watch, but I see a much more seamless future where frankly, no plastic is needed. It we’ll see what we can do with that. So I’m very excited. Is that two years? Is it 10 years? I can’t answer that.

Josh Abich

When will the fax machine go away?

Tory Passons

Apparently never. So that’s my, that’s my future, Josh. I don’t know what you see from your side of the fence, but I’m really excited about that future

Josh Abich

There’s an incredible opportunity for us just to help companies as you can, as you can sense from some of the data that we’ve been talking about. There’s still there’s numbers of organizations out there who have not adopted corporate card. They’re not using virtual card. They don’t have processes set up to offer a great experience for their employees. It’s still difficult for them to reconcile. Although there’s going to be a significant amount of growth and opportunity in the next five to 10 years, the way we see it right now, what’s in front of us is an immense opportunity to help SMB and mid-market customers, even enterprise customers struggled with these challenges too, with putting in better controls and systems across travel expense and corporate cards. For us, it’s an extremely exciting time, to simply help companies who typically would not have access to these solutions. And then what we’re seeing up market, of course, with our enterprise customers is legacy systems, really not user-friendly, they’re overbuilt, they’re costly. So again, helping them with what we’ve talked about today for us is what we see the opportunity to be. So that’s what we’re focused on right now. And I think Tory did a great job as an expert talking about what the, what the future holds for us all.

Tiffany Mast

I agree. All right. It looks like it’s about time to head into our Q&A session and we have some good questions that have come in. So first up Josh, I think this one’s for you, can US Bank and TravelBank help us manage our other card programs in addition to the instant card?

Josh Abich

The answer is yes. In addition to virtual cards, we’ve been spending a lot of time with US Bank is bringing in the ability to manage all of your corporate card programs, virtual and physical, into TravelBank. I don’t know if you saw, it was a very quick little demo, but in our user interface, you’ll be able to load up your corporate card program. And when those transactions occur, all of the reconciliation process happens automatically. And so again, we’ve, we’ve taken quite a bit of time, in R and D time to, to make sure that’s a seamless process across a virtual card and additional corporate card programs that you may be running too. Are you, do you have anything to add to that?

Tory Passons

It’s the same data feed. I would say that it’s coming off of the plastic than what’s coming out the virtual card. We do add some identifying factors to the virtual card, so they know the who and the expense reporting process, but we’re feeding all of our data to TravelBank. Now, just the virtual card data to make sure it’s all integrated especially into the expense platform. And then on the instinct card side, the individual who pushed the card can be doing the expense work or the person who got the card, if they’re an employee or have access to TravelBank. So really it’s, it’s all cards. If it’s a US Bank corporate card, I would say, as far as integration and we appreciate TravelBank doing that work with us first.

Tiffany Mast

So the next question is along a similar vein, and it also sort of touches back on the predictions question. It asks virtual card is a great solution, but can it cover 100% of transactions? If not, how does this combine with traditional payments to provide end to end coverage? I can take that.

Tory Passons

It always goes back to point of sale acceptance rate. And so it can not cover a hundred percent today. There are used cases, where if they don’t take it at the point-of-sale device, they can manually enter it in which covers some of the gaps. There’s going to be a transition period between now and later where the backup would be a, either corporate plastic at a lower limit or personal Kurtz. And so we’re hopeful that that will decrease over time. It’s decreasing rapidly right now, but the short answer is it doesn’t cover a hundred percent. A good example is, fine dining, sit down restaurants, a lot of restaurants where you walk up to the counter, you can use mobile payment, contactless payment, but at fine dining, sit down restaurants today in the U S excuse me, they’re not bringing point of sale devices to the table.

Tory Passons

If you’re in Europe or Canada, they bring it to the table. You can tap and go. So it’s much more accepted. So future state, I would say that’s the last horizon. Once we get past hotel, which we’re getting close on, is that sit down restaurant, can you pay with a mobile payment or a virtual card? So that’s going to be key. I think, there is rental car is another last horizon. I see, not just sit-down restaurants, rental car, there’s a lot of disjointedness in the process with rental cars as Josh, you know? We need to solve for that too, but frankly, corporate travelers are using a lot more Uber and Lyft and taxi than they are a rental car. So it solves for that today.

Tiffany Mast

All right. Great. I think this next one you can start by answering it. Josh. Somebody said they’re interested in our travel solution. How can they learn more about it?

Josh Abich

Oh, we’d love to spend more time, with you, individually to learn more about what you’re looking for. We’d be delighted to show you a deeper dive with the product. Typically, what we’d like to do is, to make sure that we’re solving customer problems is just, just go through a little bit of a consultative, discovery to understand what your business objectives are. And that doesn’t take us very long. And from there, we can jump right into the product and demonstrate how we would be able to solve some of those challenges that you might be looking to solve. So the short answer of all of that is we’ll follow up with you after this call and we we’d be more than delighted to give you a deep dive in the product.

Tiffany Mast

Thanks, Josh. All right. Next question. What are the disadvantages of allowing my employees to expense work purchases with their personal cards?

Tory Passons

It’s a good question. I did a bunch of research a couple of years ago with our innovation team at US Bank. So I interviewed a couple dozen CFOs and controllers trying to understand why, and when they were using personal cards and times have even changed dramatically in the last two years. But the first thing I found as I started researching personal card to use in corporate America is fraud. Abuse is very, very high, and all you need to do to that point is go see how many apps there are for creating fake receipts out there in the app store and how quickly it is for me to create any receipt at any time. And there’s books written, unfortunately on how many books written on how to defraud your company through personal card use. And it’s very, very easy. And so the reason it’s easy is the company can’t see the actual transaction, right?

Tory Passons

They can only see what the employee lets them see does. I spent this much on my card, even if the employee is sending in their credit card statement, because they can always go back and reverse that charge and you would never see it. Using personal card just really opens up the door for fraud and abuse by your employees. It’s not a good place to be as much as you might trust them. Beyond that, there’s also this concept of, is it fair to have your employees or is it right to have your employees carrying credit for the company or is it discrimination against those who don’t have credit or can’t use it, Josh? You mentioned this earlier than maybe that individual doesn’t have enough money to buy that ticket. Thus, they have to go to their manager and sheepishly say, I’m sorry, I don’t have the credit limit.

Tory Passons

So are they looked down upon compared to an employee who does have the credit, it’s a bad position to put them in, to have them carrying credit? And what I also heard was, well, we justify it because we allow them to keep their rewards. And so that’s a lot of negative to get to the rewards for the company where they can get rewards. Anyway, Josh didn’t mention their rewards platform that goes with their travel and expense. But if rewards is that important to you, you can also integrate a rewards program. That’s also saves the company money instead of costing them money. If you want to hear more about that, Josh can walk you through that, but there’s a lot of reasons that I think personal card use in corporate America is not a great idea. There’s a lot of it’s still being used today, but it does expose the company.

Tiffany Mast

Does this mean companies need to start adopting more mobile tools?

Tory Passons

I would say today, no, you don’t have to just being totally blunt, but there is going to become a tipping point at some point in time in the near future. We’ll you can figure out what near means to where you’re going to need to integrate tools such as these mobile tools because that’s where your employees just like, I like to meet my customers where they’re at, you’ll want to meet your employees where they’re at. I can give you a good example. Not that long ago, large companies like US Bank would not let their employees use Uber and Lyft. It just, they didn’t like it. They didn’t have control over it. And there’s lots of inner enterprise companies doing that, but the need became so great for the employees that were traveling, that they just refuse to get into a taxi because the user experience of using Uber and Lyft overtook the challenge, the risk challenge. So there was some things done behind the scenes to mitigate, mitigate some of that risk, but ultimately, ultimately I believe your employees are going to drive the demand of this up to the point where you’ll want to adopt it. And once you see the controls that are in place, it will be a win-win for you and employee from both user experience and controls.

Josh Abich

When we speak with customers and go through the process that we just described, mobile is always at the front and center of the capabilities that the solution extends to our employees. We believe it’s only a matter of time. Tiffany there’s one more question that came in through the Q&A is a great question with all the new found partnerships between payment systems and OBTs online booking tools and TMCs travel management companies. When will there be a global adoption slash partnership with hotel properties. This is our largest hurdle at the moment. And, we would say I TravelBank that this process has already begun. Many of the major hotel chains already have direct data integrations with payment networks, and we’ve already been working with them and issuers like US Bank to pull in this data directly into our systems. Most of the chains already have contactless enabled, point of sale systems as Tory mentioned. It’s just a matter of them toggling on that acceptance property by property, which is no doubt greatly accelerated, throughout this pandemic. Great question would love to follow up more with you after this call and, see what more questions that you have Tory, is there anything that you’d like to add to that?

Tory Passons

No, I think you nailed it. It’s happening much faster than we thought it would happen. Hotel acceptance and all the integration that goes along with that virtual card is the driving factor. But more importantly, how the hotel accepts virtual card is even more so the driving factor, because now it’s so easy for them to do so, like Josh said, they can flip the toggle. They got, they already have the point of sale device. Most of them do that except contactless and mobile payment. So they have been toggling this year quite a bit. It’s happening fast and I’m going to keep testing it as I travel personally. And hopefully soon I get to travel professionally,

Josh Abich

Likewise. I think he told me that you actually prioritize businesses that accept the mobile payment.

Tory Passons

A hundred percent I do. I’m, I’m definitely a payment nerd. So that wouldn’t be a big surprise to my family. I like how people learn as I use my mobile device to pay, including the merchants. It’s funny, even hotels will say, as you pull out your phone, no, we don’t accept mobile payment. And then when it accepts it they’re shocked. So I always try my phone first, even if there’s no symbol on the device itself, the point of sales saying they accept because just because the person behind the counter doesn’t know doesn’t mean they don’t accept it.