For more than 10 years, the global consultancy has partnered with American Express to leverage a single payments solution that tackles all its business travel and expense (T&E) spend across the globe.
“Relevance, speed and fluidity are essential to us,” says Emmanuel Erba, group chief procurement officer at Capgemini. “They are the essence of our business, and a single payment solution helps us achieve these, making it easier for our teams across the globe to partner with our clients and keep us agile.”
With so many people working with clients in so many different parts of the world, often on major technology and transformation projects that span many months or even years, the potential for subsequent financial complexity is enormous.
“Our business is one of scale, which risks creating fragmentation, friction, inefficiency and a lack of transparency. Wherever possible, we need to overcome this and create a better experience. We need to look for opportunities to concentrate our means wherever possible,” says Erba.
As a business with more than 15,000 suppliers, there is clearly a huge complexity of goods and services being delivered. Achieving harmony between the business and its suppliers is vital to the successful and smooth performance of Capgemini, whether that’s internal or external spend.
This is especially true when it comes to the day-to-day business T&E spend, which spans areas like travel, transport, subsistence, or accommodation needs while on the go. Capgemini’s T&E spend represents many hundreds of thousands of transactions.
For the client-facing team of consultants, it’s vital this happens smoothly and easily, and without incurring vast swathes of complex financial admin processes that eat into the resources of its finance and procurement teams.
Equally, its financial team must ensure spending happens within its set policy and find a way to manage a highly fragmented group of indirect suppliers – many of whom may only represent non-recurring, low-value transactions.
Relevance, speed and fluidity are essential to us
To tackle this issue and comprehensively manage T&E spend, Capgemini sought to drive spend through a single payment solution. This would offer it a single point of aggregation and consolidation for this typically low-value, high-volume spend often undertaken through one-off suppliers.
“A single payment solution makes it easier both in terms of transparency and traceability,” says Erba. “Our aim is to digitise as many of the transactional activities that take place as possible, and ultimately enable the transparency that is needed to review what we spend in real time, as well as bringing simplicity for our people.”
Capgemini chose American Express to create the best possible experience for its workforce and to help it manage reconciliation and reimbursement easily and efficiently. Today, it drives T&E spend through more than 66,000 American Express cards in use by its people all around the world.
“Importantly, these payments do not require the arsenal of check and administrative tasks that sit around the traditional purchase payment process. This gives us agility and speed when handling many thousands of T&E transactions.”
The benefit of these merchants being pre-registered with American Express provides an extra layer of security and control, and means Capgemini’s finance team do not need to manage or on-board this highly fragmented group of suppliers directly.
“We combine Amex with our expense management platform, which fully digitises the capture and reimbursement flow and gives us a real-time view over our external T&E spend,” says Erba.
One of the key advantages of the American Express payment solution is the enhanced experience it offers Capgemini’s people.
“Life is so much easier for our team members,” says Erba. “When an employee books a trip or makes a purchase, the process is fully aligned and directly billed to the American Express Card of the employee. A payment made on the card will automatically link to the expense ready to be paid by the central financing team, so the employee never has to worry about being out of pocket.”
“The feedback from our people on the American Express user experience is incredibly positive,” he adds. “For them, it’s swift and easy – while for us as a business, it’s controlled and efficient.”
For the business’ finance and admin teams, the Corporate Card solution has benefits beyond cutting down on cumbersome paperwork or time-consuming payment processes.
“Compliance is the counterpoint to transparency. Our partnership with American Express means that T&E transactions are not just consolidated, but happen within our specified rules and guidelines.”
In addition, the detailed reporting around spend also helps the business drive efficiency and better manage resources, which supports its ongoing focus on sustainability.
“For us, reducing the overall volume of goods we buy through these insights is one step in our journey around reducing the impact of our operation on the environment.”
These payments do not require the arsenal of check and administrative tasks that sit around the traditional purchase payment process. This gives us agility and speed when handling many thousands of T&E transactions
“When we have reviews with our team at American Express, it’s not just about how much we are spending or how much we have deployed the card in a certain cities or countries, the most valuable insights are the pattern of our spend and how we benchmark against the wider industry.”
Erba continues: “American Express has a broad view of the market and is always bringing to the table opportunities for us to streamline spend that we are not yet taking advantage of. These add tremendous value.”
The strong and long-standing partnership with American Express was recently recognised at Capgemini’s 2022 Supplier Day, with American Express winning one of three Supplier of the Year awards.
“The American Express team helped us increase our resilience and stability during Covid, acting proactively and quickly to help our team adjust to the ‘new normal’. They very quickly focused on solutions to help keep our team collaborating and performing.”
Looking ahead, the partnership looks set to go from strength to strength, including increasing use of American Express’ virtual payment tool.
This offers user-friendly digital payment solution for small B2B value purchases without the need for a card, especially for transactions that are not related to a single team member and are more for collective use.
“At Capgemini, we have people constantly forming and reforming teams to work on short or medium-term projects. The value for these folks is in the ability to gather together and collaborate. So, whether it’s booking an event space or meeting room, or making sure they have internet access, we want to make it as easy as possible for them,” says Erba.
“Virtual payments really make a difference here. I’m incredibly proud that some of our team are able to make – for example – purchases like training using the virtual payment product,” says Erba. “This makes us more responsive as a business and makes the whole experience much easier.”
According to Erba, these virtual card payments may be increasingly important: “In procurement, the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work any more. We need to adjust the payment means to the type and volume of transactions that are taking place.”
“At Capgemini, we are focused on enabling the future that we all want,” he concludes. “And for us, this is about making T&E transactions swift and easy, but also controlled, so our teams can focus on supporting our people and our clients and not admin.”
