In the world of corporate travel, embedded finance for business travel is no longer just a buzzword – it’s a strategic imperative. Travel Management Companies (TMCs) have built the means to access virtual cards issued to their customers by their respective banks, and travel distribution platforms like Amadeus and Sabre began integrating virtual cards years ago to simplify pre-trip bookings and secure payments. This innovation brought much-needed automation and control to the travel supply chain.
But while embedded finance has transformed how companies book travel, it has yet to fully transform how they manage travel. The true opportunity – and the next wave of innovation – lies not in what happens before take-off, but in what happens after.
This post explores why in-trip expenses remain a blind spot in many platforms, what it’s costing the industry, and how embedded finance – when applied at the right moment – unlocks significant product and revenue potential.
The industry already solved pre-trip payments
Virtual cards have been foundational to modern business travel. Long before “embedded finance” entered the vocabulary, travel platforms were generating virtual cards behind the scenes to pay suppliers, automate reconciliation, and ensure transaction-level controls.
By 2017, Amadeus had integrated virtual cards into its booking terminals for online travel agents. Sabre followed with similar functionality shortly after. TMCs had long before supported the use of virtual cards issued to their corporate customers by their respective banks, and fairly quickly those TMCs serving smaller businesses whose banks did not offer them virtual cards, got their own sources of virtual cards in order to streamline the booking process.
These solutions work well – but they solve only part of the problem. They’re focused on booked-in-advance spend: flights, hotels, rail, pre-arranged transfers. They don’t address what happens once the traveller arrives.
In-trip spend is significant, but overlooked
According to the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), global corporate travel spend is expected to reach $1.5 trillion in 2024¹. What’s less frequently discussed is that up to 40% of that spend takes place during the trip – meals, local transport, event expenses, client entertainment, even Wi-Fi and roaming charges².
That puts the value of in-trip expenses at an estimated $600 billion globally per year. This is not some obscure corner of the market – it’s nearly half the budget, managed with tools that belong to a different era.
So what’s the commercial opportunity?
Let’s run a quick back-of-the-serviette calculation.
Say a travel platform captures just 1% of global in-trip spend by offering embedded payments for incidentals. That’s $6 billion in additional transaction volume flowing through the platform. At a 1% of the value (a typical share of interchange), that’s around $60 million in annual revenue – not from upselling or value added services, but from infrastructure that enables a better user experience.
And that’s just 1%. The full opportunity is orders of magnitude larger.
The user experience is broken – and everyone feels it
From the traveller’s perspective, the moment they land in Madrid or San Francisco, the booking platform effectively disappears. It handled the flight and hotel, but now they’re on their own – navigating taxis, meals, client meetings and wifi charges with a personal card or a separate expense management tool.
Meanwhile, most companies now manage these in-trip costs in entirely different systems – think Ramp, Pleo, or Expensify – with their own approval flows, card issuance logic and reporting frameworks. The result? A fragmented view of the trip, with travel bookings in one system and expenses in another.
For finance teams, this creates three major problems:
- Missed visibility: It’s almost impossible to get a unified picture of a trip’s full cost. That means no clear ROI on events or travel, and more manual work to reconcile what was planned versus what was spent.
- Weaker controls: Travel policies often have to be implemented separately – once during booking, then again in the expense system. That introduces gaps, inconsistencies and policy drift, especially across teams or markets.
- Lost opportunity for platforms: For travel management companies (TMCs) and booking platforms, this is a major blind spot. By stopping at the point of booking, they forfeit a deeper relationship with their users – and the revenue potential that comes with it. They also risk higher churn as finance teams turn to unified solutions that offer more complete visibility and control.
The fix: embedded finance, applied to in-trip spend
Now imagine the same traveller heading to Madrid. Instead of receiving a general-purpose card – or none at all – the system issues pre-approved virtual cards tied to specific budgets: €60 per day for meals, €100 for local transport, €50 for incidentals.
Each card is embedded within the platform and governed by merchant category codes (MCCs), location restrictions, and daily limits. Cards are automatically funded at the moment of spend – not days in advance. No cash tied up in advance, no overspending. No reimbursements. No claims processing. Just clean, compliant, real-time financial execution.
This isn’t hypothetical. Some platforms are already building in this direction:
- TravelPerk acquired expenses management firm Yokoy and has begun integrating expense management directly into its platform.
- Navan offers employees dynamic cards to cover policy-approved in-trip spend.
- SAP Concur connects itinerary data with expense capture, allowing tighter policy controls on trip-related purchases. This is a far cry from the fully embedded, real-time control solutions offered by Navan and Travelperk but it demonstrates the need for such controls.
Each of these players is shifting from booking engine to trip management platform – and embedded finance is a key part of that evolution.
Why now?
Three forces make this moment particularly ripe for change:
- Corporate travel is rebounding: GBTA projects business travel will surpass pre-pandemic levels by 2025¹. As volumes rise, so do inefficiencies and pressure to improve ROI on T&E systems.
- Technology has caught up: Modern embedded finance providers can now offer compliant, flexible, pre-configured virtual card issuance for non-fintechs – without forcing them to become banks.
- Customer expectations have evolved: Finance teams no longer accept delayed reimbursements and opaque workflows. Employees expect the same seamless, controlled experience they get in consumer apps – where payments are instant, policy-aware, and invisible in the background. The widespread adoption of Apple Pay and Google Pay among business travellers, along with near-universal acceptance of contactless payments, has only reinforced this expectation. Today, employees assume they’ll pay with their phones – instantly and effortlessly – making platforms that still rely on legacy cards or post-trip expense claims feel increasingly outdated.
Reframing embedded finance as a workflow enabler
Rather than thinking of embedded finance as just infrastructure, it’s more useful to think of it as a product design tool. When payments, approvals and controls are native to the platform, new workflows become possible – workflows that are smarter, safer, and better aligned with customer needs.
Business travel platforms are well-positioned to lead this shift. They already have the data, the user base, and the context. What they’ve lacked – until now – is the infrastructure to embed finance deeply enough to support the full trip.
Final thought
Virtual cards have been in the travel tech stack for years. But their potential is still only half realised. The Virtual cards have been in the travel tech stack for years. But their potential is still only half realised. The real value will emerge when these tools support not just the flight and hotel – but everything that happens in between.
For platforms ready to make that leap, embedded finance isn’t just a way to streamline payments. It’s the key to owning more of the customer journey, and turning operational complexity into product value.
¹ GBTA Business Travel Outlook 2024
² Estimate based on GBTA reports and spend categorisations
