American Express (NYSE: AXP) and Cvent (Nasdaq: CVT), a meetings, events, and hospitality technology provider, introduced enhanced features to the Cvent Event Marketing & Management platform that “further expand virtual payment capabilities, leveraging American Express’ integrated budget management and payment automation solutions.”
The enhanced features “provide a seamless meetings & events (M&E) payment experience for American Express Corporate Meeting Card and vPayment clients using the Cvent Event Marketing & Management platform,” by:
- Streamlining onboarding and improving the user experience, including a step-by-step escalation process to provide additional support
- Simplifying M&E expense allocation with American Express @ Work Reconciliation®, a free 24/7 tool that eases the invoicing process
- Increasing virtual funding account options with vPayment, an American Express® payment solution that assigns a single-use account number to each transaction to help increase billing efficiency, expected to be available in the US and UK late 2022
- Incorporating an automated reconciliation process, providing users with greater budget visibility, more audit controls, and better data consistency, expected to be available early in 2023
Dean Henry, Executive Vice President, Global Business Financing, Payments & Digital Experiences at American Express, stated:
“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. That’s why we partnered with Cvent to deliver an enhanced virtual payment and automation solution that helps provide a seamless user experience and better serves our clients’ needs.”
According to the new American Express Meeting & Events Trendex1, 97% of corporate event planners “believe company events and meetings are equally or more important compared to pre-pandemic, with about three-fourths (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 & expense budget platform (39%)
- Greater budget visibility (37%)
- Automated end-to-end reconciliation (37%)
Since 2018, American Express and Cvent’s virtual payments integration “has allowed event managers to pay suppliers and manage meetings and events budgets with American Express virtual account numbers via the Cvent Event Marketing & Management platform.”
These new American Express and Cvent enhancements “aim to address growing needs as companies continue to reimagine what returning to the office, M&E planning, and business travel look like.”
Anil Punyapu, Cvent Senior Vice President of Sales, remarked:
“Capturing actual meetings and events spend has long been an organizational pain-point with cumbersome invoices, manual spreadsheets, and siloed processes – which ultimately leads to decreased visibility and reduced budget control. For over two decades, Cvent has helped thousands of companies gain greater control over these expenditures, and with our American Express® payment enhancements, organizations can streamline their payment and reconciliation processes to deliver greater visibility and insights into their total meeting and event spend. In today’s environment, controlling costs is essential for event programs to maximize ROI and prove their value to the organization.”