American Express and Cvent, the meetings, events, and hospitality technology provider, have introduced enhanced features to the Cvent Event Marketing & Management platform. The improvement, they say, will expand virtual payment capabilities, leveraging American Express’s budget management and payment automation solutions. The partners claim there has been a streamlining of onboarding and improving the user experience. M&E expense allocation has been simplified with American Express @ Work Reconciliation®, a free 24/7 tool designed to ease the invoicing process. There has also been an increase in virtual funding account options, with vPayment, an American Express® payment solution that assigns a single-use account number to each transaction. That is expected to be available in the US and UK late 2022. New automated reconciliation processes promise greater budget visibility, more audit controls, and better data consistency, and are expected to be available early in 2023. “As large companies increasingly look to bring people back together for client events or internal gatherings, they want more simplification, efficiency and automation, and managing their budgets has become more important,” said Dean Henry, executive vice-president, Global Business Financing, Payments & Digital Experiences, at American Express. “That’s why we partnered with Cvent to deliver an enhanced virtual payment and automation solution that helps provide a seamless user experience.” According to the American Express Meeting & Events Trendex poll of 305 corporate meeting planners in early September, 97% of corporate event planners believe company events and meetings are equally or more important compared to pre-pandemic, with about three-quarters (74%) saying they expect their 2023 meetings and events budget to increase. While over eight in ten (81%) planners are already using an automated payment process, 82% say they plan to further automate their payment processes within the next six months. Looking deeper into the main attributes corporate event planners are looking for in a spend management software platform, the top five are:
- Simple user experience (50%)
- Enhanced security (48%)
- One integrated meeting and expense budget platform (39%)
- Greater budget visibility (37%)
- Automated end-to-end reconciliation (37%)
“Capturing actual meetings and events spend has long been an organisational pain-point with cumbersome invoices, manual spreadsheets, and siloed processes – which ultimately leads to decreased visibility and reduced budget control,” said Anil Punyapu, Cvent senior vice-president of sales.”
