Why Capgemini partnered with American Express to create a single payment solution for its T&E spend worldwide

“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.”

As a global business working with clients across different industries, often on major technology and transformation projects that span many months or even years, the potential for financial complexity is huge. “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.”

With over 15,000 suppliers, there is a huge complexity of goods and services being delivered. Whether internal or external spend, achieving harmony between the business and its suppliers is vital to the smooth and successful performance of Capgemini – especially when it comes to day-to-day business T&E spend which represents hundreds of thousands of transactions. Equally, Capgemini’s financial team must ensure spending happens within its set policy and must find a way to manage a highly fragmented group of indirect suppliers.

A single payment solution was key to tackling this problem – offering Capgemini a single point of aggregation and consolidation for this typically low-value, high-volume spend, often undertaken through one-off suppliers.

“The solution makes it easier both in terms of transparency and traceability. 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 spending through more than 66,000 American Express® Cards in use across the world.

“We combine Amex with our expense management platform, which fully digitises the capture and reimbursement flow, giving us a real-time view over our external T&E spend.”

As well as the benefits for security and control, the American Express payment solution also provides Capgemini’s people with an enhanced experience. “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.”

For the business finance and admin teams, the Corporate Card solution has clear benefits around reducing admin and time-consuming processes. But American Express delivers more than just a payment solution. “Amex have a broad view of the market and is always bringing to the table opportunities for us to streamline spending that we are not yet taking advantage of. These add tremendous value.”

Looking ahead, the partnership looks set to go from strength to strength, including increasing use of American Express’ virtual payment tool, which offers a user-friendly digital payment solution for small B2B value purchases without the need for a Card. “At Capgemini, we are focused on enabling the future that we all want. 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.”