Press

Between managing your budgets, making sure you’re adhering to your company’s travel policies and filing expense reports, its often hard to find time to enjoy a business trip. Looking to transform this headache into an incentive—particularly for the growing millennial workforce—startup TravelBank promises to give employees more travel choices while simultaneously helping businesses spend less money.

Where TravelBank differs from some of its competition like Concur is that it incentivizes employees to come in under budget by having their company split the savings with them. For instance, if the budget for a week trip to New York was $3,000, but an employee saved $600 by taking the subway rather than taxis and staying in a slightly lower-rated hotel, then the employee will receive half the savings back–in this case, $300.

TravelBank, the modern budgeting and expense app for business, recently launched Flights, enabling businesses using TravelBank to search for and book flights—all through the TravelBank app. Flights is launching with: Air Canada, China Southern Airlines, Copa Airlines, Icelandair, JetBlue, United Airlines, Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, Saudia Airlines, Singapore Airlines, and other major U.S. airline carriers.

We recently completed a research report looking at the young companies pioneering AI-powered “data-first” applications, and there is a lot of important activity happening in this space. Collectively, these startups have raised $1.8 billion of venture capital to pursue their goal of disrupting the $150 billion-plus market for enterprise applications.

2016 was the year expense management players got more aggressive, strategic and intelligent. While the sector has unarguably consolidated, that hasn’t stopped new players, armed with intuitive technologies and consumer-style interfaces, from launching solutions that could turn into prime acquisition targets for established providers looking to leapfrog competitors.

New travel expenses app TravelBank helps workers book trips and file claims more efficiently, and allows employers to offer incentives for coming in under budget. TravelBank chief executive Duke Chung says: "Many companies are still using clunky expense reporting methods that don't hold employees to a budget or allow them to forecast spend accurately.