Growing fintech’s footprint in travel

Although the travel sector is ripe for fintech-driven disruption, established giants like Amex and SAP arguably maintain a solid grip on the space. Even if their products are more intuitive and are driven by modern tech, challengers face an uphill battle converting businesses to their platforms. But, among other strategies, successful sales and marketing teams have cracked the code through two decisive moves:

Reaching the back office

Torpago, which is building next-gen business spend management software, recognized early into its journey that the back office is a key stakeholder to sway and convert. Crucially, says Brent Jackson, Torpago’s Founder and CEO, the majority of their clients are not VC-backed startups.

“Your more mainstream verticals didn't really benefit from [business spend solutions], but we’re seeing them now on the forefront of automating the back office,” he said. “We’re seeing that work from home and the pandemic—these winds coming together—have forced companies to see what’s out there.”

Its product team has solved for back offices’ needs as a means to bolster marketing teams’ chances of success, ensuring that their solution connects to a range of tools, like NetSuite, UKG, and Slack. “The back office plays a lot of roles, and they use a lot of systems, so making sure that you have a modern system that integrates with all your tools is something pretty big that we get a lot of requests for,” Jackson said.

Finally, offering white-glove integrations are particularly important for back offices, especially those with little bandwidth. “We really try and enable their success a lot more,” he said.

Strength in brandlessness

As with other sectors that fintech touches, the travel space has seen an influx of white-label and embedded solutions that let travel platforms and other relevant systems introduce fintech while maintaining brand consistency. Major travel stalwarts like Expedia and KAYAK now offer BNPL, for instance, providing contemporary financial products to consumers without rupturing the user flows and travel services their customers are used to.

Especially as VCs pivot to prioritizing B2B ploys over DTC or B2C missions, we should expect other travel- and payments-focused fintechs to forego consumer-focused brand ubiquity in exchange for healthy unit economics and more resilient revenue streams.