TREND #4 — Proliferation of Mobile Reporting, BYOD and Platform Convergence
My last trend mentioned how AI/ ML technology is going to give Greater Visibility & Control over fraud.
Mobile expense reporting will gain pace from the current 9% due to the rapidly growing adoption of smartphones and other mobile devices. Moreover, WFH (Work From Home), VPN (Virtual Private Network) Connectivity, or the better bandwidth offered via 4G services across service providers such as Airtel, Jio, and Vodafone Idea have made accessibility a lot better than it was even a couple of years ago.
Currently, despite the widespread penetration of mobile devices and desktops, merely 12% and 27% of travel claim requests are processed from these devices. But as BYOD and company-provided mobile devices become increasingly common, employees will be able to submit expense reports automatically in the same instant that they receive an invoice, and track approvals via mobile apps.
As millennials are accounting for a more substantial part of the country’s workforce, they’re expecting the same level of technology sophistication at the workplace as well. Millennials are known to be open to trying out newer payment systems, as long as the rewards are worth it. Process simplification, lesser paperwork, minimum approval hops are the areas that organizations target for immediate results. Additional features such as personalization, location, and device-agnostic mobility, etc. only add to the appeal.
Mobile adoption will accelerate the convergence of travel booking and expense management platform. As user experience gains importance, one of the first needs to emerge in the T&E transformation process will be the need for streamlining. With business travel becoming costly and infrequent post-COVID-19, there’s a significant opportunity to better support it via integration with related expense management. A booking platform that not only helps create flight and hotel reservations but also facilitates instant cash transfers and real-time submission, monitoring, and tracking of cancellation claims are instrumental in terms of saving time and relieving employee frustration.
Another unstated benefit of this change is in the form of audit support. Audits are often very painful for many organizations, as stated by 55% of the CFOs, retrieval of past data was too time-consuming and people-intensive. Thus, mobile booking, expense submission, and reporting will not only help control expenses but also ensure compliance and more accessible data retrieval for the future.
I hope you are liking the Trend series to discuss these trends with Industry leading CXOs, I am hosting a webinar on 17th June. You can drop by for this enriching session by registering here.
