From your position as an observer, what trends are driving business travel management today?
Julie Troussicot - First of all, I can see a significant impact of inflation on travel budgets. As a result, even companies that were not very mature in managing their business travel, such as SMEs and ETIs, are starting to take an interest. The major accounts had already reduced the overall number of trips following Covid. When an SME or ETI embarks on a journey, it's because it's essential. In fact, they were the first to start moving again during the pandemic. This year, we were still a little way out of Covid. Companies tended to think "it's expensive, but we'll have to go back anyway". But now, with the impact of inflation still very strong, the desire to control costs is becoming a priority for 2024.
How can AirPlus help?
Julie Troussicot - As payment players, we obviously have a role to play. We are being approached by new customers and a large number of prospective SME/SMI customers who want to see what is actually happening within their company, if not to control costs. Implementing a centralised payment solution is a very important step. the first building block for a clear vision of the travel budget before possibly reducing it later. This is one of the key trends for 2024. The other major trend is the desire of companies to extend the optimisation of their travel budget to include MICE.
It's an old sea serpent, isn't it?
Julie Troussicot - Except that I have the impression that this sea serpent is really emerging. Since the pandemic, companies have started to make fewer trips to meet one or two people. On the other hand, they continue to make a lot of trips to meet a lot of people. The events aspect of business travel is becoming more important. In this context, the ROI of an event is easier to analyse than that of an individual trip. Hence the importance of being able to put a figure on it.
What solutions are you bringing to the MICE sector?
Julie Troussicot - In addition to our traditional solutions - embedded, corporate or virtual cards - we have launched a specific initiative at global level, and in France in particular, to approach players in the sector in order to interface with them. What we traditionally do with travel agencies, airlines or car hire, we can also do for MICE, for example with the MICE branches of TMCs, independent players such as Kactus or Rejolt, formerly Business Table. This strategic development initiative was launched in 2023, to ensure that our payment solutions are accessible to all MICE operators. This will enable our customers to consolidate payments and data.
Do your customers also want to consolidate their meetings and events business?
Julie Troussicot - At the moment, our customers, particularly CAC 40 companies, have all more or less launched a call for tenders, or at least a sourcing process, to try and find the best solutions for their needs. streamline the organisation of MICE and concentrate it on a maximum of two or three partners. So they're going to want to pay for their expenses with a payment solution, either a debit card or a virtual card. Hence our desire to develop links with these suppliers. This is one of our major challenges this year.
You were talking about the desire of companies to control costs, with visibility of their expenditure upstream. Do you have anything new to offer them?
Julie Troussicot - If I want to control my costs, I have to analyse them first. We were already offering a whole range of dashboards for this purpose. As part of our digital transformation, which began just over three years ago, we are now launching a new service, the AirPlus Intelligence Hub. An analysis platform based on artificial intelligence, much more powerful and intuitive, where you can sort and search for expenses by keyword. For example, if you type in the name of an event, all the payments relating to it will appear on a dashboard. As we go along, we're adding to our new digital platform functions that existed in the old world and that we're bringing into the new world, using today's technologies.
The new brand identity you have just unveiled echoes this digital transformation.
Julie Troussicot - Indeed, it goes hand in hand with our new 'Smart&Simple' baseline. All our efforts over the last five years to transform our products can be summed up in this brand identity. And all future developments will be geared towards this goal: clarity and simplification, not complexity. We haven't completely finished migrating all our products to the new platform, which will happen in 2024. But 80% has come a long way, and we are now very confident in the robustness of the solutions we offer. The repositioning of our brand is thus the culmination of our digital transformation and concludes all the work that has been done.
This repositioning is therefore totally unrelated to the current takeover of AirPlus by the SEB Bank group. How are things progressing on this front?
Julie Troussicot - We can't talk about it today, as the competition authorities are still studying it. But everything should be confirmed by the end of the second quarter of 2024. However, in this kind of sale, the most important thing is upstream. That's the signing of the deal, which took place at the end of June. There is no reason why it shouldn't come to fruition. And everything that was said at the time remains valid. Lufthansa gave a great deal of thought and discussion to SEB Bank before selling to us. For its part, this group had been looking to buy AirPlus for a long time. It is a thoughtful story with real complementarityThey are in the Nordic countries and we are in Western and Southern Europe.
Let's get back to your products. How far have you got with developing your corporate card?
Julie Troussicot - We launched it during the pandemic, but we can estimate that it really came out in 2022. In two years, we have multiplied our customer base in France by 4 or 5 to reach almost 10,000 cardholders, for a total of 370,000 cards in Europe. Although this is a new offering in France, we're pretty happy with the growth we've seen. in line with our estimates10% of our customers are equipped with a corporate card. The corporate card has never been a lever for accelerating our growth. It complements our offer for customers who do not yet have one. But there may be other ways of deploying it in the future.
Is the payment function becoming increasingly strategic?
Julie Troussicot - When you talk to travel buyers, the question of payment comes up every time they talk to a new supplier. Payment is linked to many issues. Companies are being audited more and more, and are therefore obliged to have extremely cumbersome accounting systems. Payment can be a solution in this context. We can also see that the scope of travel management has broadened, dealing more and more with issues related to human resources. Over and above the safety and well-being of travellers, which has been the subject of much discussion in recent years, there is the notion of more stringent legal obligations. This is another area, payment is one of the solutions. For example, it is no longer socially acceptable to ask an employee to pay company expenses in advance. It used to be that everything was charged to the employee's card, but that's no longer acceptable. With inflation and other financial problems, one manager in seven is overdrawn at the end of the month because of business expenses.
Is acceptance of your solutions still an issue today?
Julie Troussicot - In a way, no, because our virtual Mastercard is accepted everywhere. However, we are continuing to widen acceptance of our hosted card, based on the UATP network. It's still the Rolls Royce of paymentWith a quality of integration, fluidity and data that can't be found anywhere else. No virtual card today is capable of providing this level of data. So we're continuing to expand its scope. For example, in 2023, we signed a partnership agreement with Uber for Business, enabling their customers to pay their bills with the AirPlus card. And we are discussing this possibility with other partners, particularly in the MICE sector.
