Emburse plans ‘reimagined’ Chrome River and rebranded Tripbam

Emburse is continuing its movement toward a “fully integrated travel suite”, including an integrated booking offering, a redesign of Chrome River Expense and rebranding Tripbam.

On the booking side, Emburse traditionally has taken an “agnostic” approach to online booking tools, even with its own Certify Travel offering, built following its acquisition of NuTravel’s corporate online booking tool.

Emburse CEO Marne Martin said that approach will continue, including its relationship with Amadeus, which was announced in 2023.

However, the company is now moving Emburse Book to be “completely integrated” with its other offerings including Emburse Expense, Tripbam and Emburse Go, alongside clients’ travel management companies and Emburse’s virtual card offering, she said.

“Now with NDC (New Distribution Capability) and the ability to do more direct booking, we’re taking a new view, not only in how the Emburse Book process happens but how it flows through,” Martin said. “It’s not just the user experience and driving compliance and saving money where you can save money, but we can also reduce fraud.”

Emburse’s Chrome River Expense also is being “reimagined” with a redesigned interface and additional automation and AI features, with better capabilities to automatically categorise expenses and assure compliance.  

“In a perfect world, we’re able to continue bringing Chrome River forward so that pretty much every expense has already been validated,” Martin said. “It knows that it is not only compliant, but we’ve reshopped it where we could, and it’s flowing into either a conventional-style expense report that can be pre-approved or automatically approved or a type of a more efficient process.”

Reshopping and price auditing platform Tripbam, which Emburse acquired a year ago, is to move fully under the Emburse umbrella with new names for its various capabilities: Emburse Reshop, Emburse Audit and Emburse Benchmark. 

Martin said there will be a “migration” this year, with the Tripbam website and branding continuing until a switchover to the Emburse branding either later this year or during 2025.

Tripbam’s sales force, which Emburse has been overseeing, will also will be integrated into Emburse’s overall go-to-market strategy, she added.

Emburse earlier this year named Tripbam founder Steve Reynolds as general manager of Emburse Travel, and Reynolds is now Emburse’s chief strategy officer.

Overall, the company is aiming to become the “first platform with a plug-and-play approach” targeting large multinational programmes, added Reynolds.