Rapid Financial Progress Impeded by Travel Expenses
It's July 31, 2025, and the world of business travel is on the brink of a significant transformation. As the return-to-office momentum gains traction, travel is once again becoming a business-critical investment. However, this renewed focus on travel brings with it a complex set of challenges for Chief Financial Officers (CFOs).
CFOs are facing a complex balancing act, including controlling costs, managing inflation, integrating new technologies like AI, and fueling growth. Amidst this intricate dance, travel spend remains a high-friction blind spot, causing frustration, inefficiency, and risk.
However, the solution to this conundrum lies in the adoption of embedded payments. By embedding payments directly into the travel booking process, finance leaders can streamline operations and drive growth. This transformation unifies travel booking, payment, and expense reporting into a seamless, automated workflow that increases real-time visibility, reduces manual tasks, and enhances control over spend.
Embedded solutions offer several key benefits. Firstly, they simplify the workflow and provide real-time visibility. By consolidating travel itinerary details, payments, and expense submission into a single platform or app, they remove the need for multiple disconnected systems, reducing friction for employees and providing finance with instant, comprehensive data on travel spend.
Secondly, they eliminate manual expense management. Automated expense data capture, such as receipts attached automatically to trips and AI-assisted expense validation, cuts out manual receipt chasing, reduces duplicate entries, and accelerates approval processes. This reduces the workload on both travelers and finance teams while improving data accuracy.
Thirdly, they enable automated and accurate reconciliation. Payments tied directly to corporate or virtual cards are linked automatically to specific trips and budgets, enabling real-time data flow into financial systems. This supports automated reconciliation, compliance checks, and reporting, offering CFOs a single source of truth for travel expenses.
Fourthly, they reduce fraud risks and offer better cost control. Integrated payments reduce fraud risks through virtual cards with configurable limits and expiration, while centralized spend data enables better policy enforcement and predictive spend orchestration. CFOs can move from reactive oversight to strategic leadership in travel spend management.
Lastly, they enhance the employee experience and productivity. By removing administrative burdens and integrating travel details and payments into one intuitive app, business travelers have a smoother experience, which can aid retention and productivity—ultimately supporting business growth.
In the banking sector, the adoption of embedded payments is already gaining traction. For instance, Hilton became the first global hotel chain to automate virtual card payments end to end. PwC and Kayak have also used blockchain to streamline travel, reducing cost and complexity, and increasing flexibility and flow.
In conclusion, the modern CFO plays multiple roles, including growth architect, culture shaper, and technology enabler. Embedded payments can remove hassle for travellers, reduce risk for the business, and unlock control for finance teams. Finance leaders who embrace embedded payments now will reduce friction, unlock insight, and transform travel for their organisations, ultimately setting them up for success in the new era of business travel.
Jason Lalor, CEO at Conferma, is at the forefront of this revolution. As more businesses adopt embedded payments, the landscape of travel expense management is set to change dramatically, transforming from fragmented and manual processes into an intelligent, automated system that empowers CFOs with real-time insights, operational efficiency, and strategic control, accelerating financial and organisational performance.
CFOs can utilize embedded payments to streamline travel expenses, providing a seamless, automated workflow that increases real-time visibility and reduces manual tasks, thereby enhancing control over spend. This transformation in travel expense management will set organizations up for success in the new era of business travel.
The banking sector is already embracing embedded payments, with examples like Hilton automating virtual card payments end-to-end and PwC and Kayak using blockchain to streamline travel, demonstrating their potential to reduce cost and complexity while increasing flexibility and efficiency.
