Navigating the New Era of Business Travel: Mastering Spend Management with Virtual Cards

The business traveler may accumulate many miles in 2025.

The pandemic is now a memory; in-person meetings, conventions, trade expos, and interactions with vendors and suppliers appear to be on a steady rebound.

In the closing days of the previous year, the Global Business Travel Association reported that corporate travel agencies indicated business travel met or surpassed expectations in 2024. Over two-thirds of firms express optimism for 2025. A significant number of corporations are looking to increase their travel budgets for face-to-face assemblages and conferences. 

Three out of five purchasers of commercial travel services report their staff are participating in more meetings and conferences than was observed the prior year. For the enterprises sending those personnel out, maintaining cost control remains vital and has been reported by 78% of firms surveyed.

Corporate Cards and Reconciliation

Corporate cards and expense management systems are being integrated to facilitate the efforts to oversee and reconcile expenses. In one announcement, Brex and Navan announced in October that they have introduced a new collaborative offering for enterprises that consolidates travel payments into a single workflow. BrexPay for Navan offers an integrated solution for business travel and payments by combining Navan’ travel services with Brex’s global corporate cards. Additionally, in May, as reported by PYMNTS, American Express partnered with travel and expense software provider Emburse.

Through this collaboration, clients link their card programs to Emburse Spend to generate virtual cards, an alternative payment method that replaces a physical card number with a digital one. The initiative is intended for American Express business, corporate, and corporate purchasing card clients adopting a unified solution for virtual card issuance, card reconciliation, and expense oversight.

In another initiative, Mastercard and NatWest collaborated to launch a mobile virtual card payment solution for businesses in the United Kingdom. Approval2Buy is the first service in Europe using Mastercard’s mobile virtual card application, according to the companies’ announcements. And just weeks ago, the global travel and expense management firm Mesh Payments stated it was collaborating with SoFi Bank as its sponsoring bank and with Galileo Financial Technologies to integrate Mesh’s expense and card framework with Galileo’s payment processing platform. 

Commercial Travel Firms

Some of the same trends that are transforming corporate travel — the transition to digital payments, enhanced back-end processes, virtual cards — are also evident for commercial travel agencies serving enterprise clients. 

As PYMNTS Intelligence discovered, in its Growth Corporates Working Capital Index, commissioned by Visa, the utilization of working capital solutions, encompassing virtual cards, is projected to rise by 25% for commercial travel firms. Business growth is among the primary reasons corporations adopt working capital. The data indicates that 87% of commercial travel firms are likely to utilize at least one corporate travel solution this year — and 73% of firms surveyed in this sector stated they would do so to implement those solutions strategically.