Simplifying business travel management: Yokoy launches Smart Lodge Card
The fintech Yokoy adds a new product to its portfolio to further automate travel and expense processes and enable companies to gain new insights: the Yokoy Smart Lodge Card bridges the gap between business travel and expense management. The digital-first card is deeply embedded in Yokoy’s spend management platform and integrated with the systems of selected travel partners. Thus, travel managers and finance departments gain full transparency when it comes to managing business trips and assessing travel spend.
The card is the latest addition to the Yokoy spend management platform that consolidates and automates all accounts payable processes, providing companies with actionable insights. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), Yokoy gives medium and large companies full control of their corporate spending by automating global expense management, invoice processing and corporate card handling.
Raising the bar for business travel management by fully automating processes Especially companies with lots of business travel activities spend a lot of time reconciling travel invoices with transaction data – a repetitive task that is not only cumbersome, but error prone and costly. Yokoy tackles this issue with the Yokoy Smart Lodge Card, by enabling automatic reconciliation. While lodge card operators typically provide monthly statements, all travel and transaction data from the Yokoy Smart Lodge Card is directly fed into the spend management solution, where it is reconciled without manual intervention. Thus, companies not only gain speed when handling travel expenses, they also have a better overview of their travel spend and can focus on projects that really add value.
By merging travel payments with a powerful spend management platform, Yokoy is making a staple of corporate travel smart. A lodge card is a virtual corporate card that is stored in the travel booking tool of a company. All expenditures for flights, trains and travel agency fees run through this single card – in some cases hotels can also be booked through a lodge card. An employee can thus choose a flight or train ticket via the company’s online booking tool, which is then paid automatically with the lodge card.
The Yokoy Smart Lodge Card – a hidden gem for finance departments The Yokoy Smart Lodge Card - issued as a Visa debit card for the EU market - works exactly in this way, with the added benefit of automated workflows. Pooling the travel data within the Yokoy spend management solution creates full transparency over travel spend and forms the basis for new insights. Among others, companies can leverage these insights for advanced cost control: they can, for instance, evaluate how much is spent on an employee, department or project level.
Especially in difficult times like these, it is more important than ever for finance departments to make targeted decisions quickly and minimize unnecessary costs. Leveraging the Yokoy Smart Lodge Card is yet another step towards a fully data-driven decision making process for CFOs and their finance department. Additionally, Yokoy does not charge card, transaction nor foreign exchange (FX) fees. Also, companies receive 0.1% cashback on every transaction.
The Yokoy Smart Lodge Card is integrated with the travel booking tool TravelPerk as well as with travel agencies that leverage the travel profile data management service Umbrella. Integrations with additional market-leading travel companies will follow.
“Whenever businesses struggle with payment reconciliation, the primary issue is typically the volume and complexity of transactions like canceled transactions”, says Philippe Sahli, CEO of Yokoy. “By using the Yokoy Smart Lodge Card, companies are able to address this problem and automate the whole matching and reconciliation process. Our solution will thus revolutionize the way that companies deal with travel expenses in the future by eliminating the extensive manual work still involved today. For us, adding the Yokoy Smart Lodge Card to our product portfolio means that we can provide a real value-add to travel managers, HR teams, CFOs and finance departments on their way towards process automation and financial excellence.”
For a complete overview of all travel expenses, the Yokoy Smart Lodge Card can be combined with the Yokoy Business Platinum Visa Card to also cover expenses incurred during the trip, like paying for a taxi or dinner. “While our new lodge card addresses pre-trip payments, our smart corporate card gives employees the flexibility to pay for their expenses while they are traveling,” Sahli says. “In the end all these transactions come together in Yokoy for reconciliation, giving finance departments a complete overview over the entire costs of a business trip.”
