American Express Company and Concur Technologies, have entered into an alliance involving both an exclusive marketing partnership and a strategic investment by American Express in Concur. Through the marketing alliance, Concur will exclusively promote American Express’s Corporate Cards to its clients and American Express’s Global Commercial Card business will exclusively promote “Concur Expense” an T&E expense management solution to its corporate clients.
American Express has purchased approximately a 13% stake in Concur which has over 7,000 clients, for its on-demand service designed to streamline and simplify T&E expense management and has the right to purchase an additional 1.28 million shares of Concur common stock at any time during the next two years, at $39.27 per share.
“We’re seeing growing demand from corporations for solutions that offer additional savings and control by automating labour-intensive expense management processes,” said Anré Williams, President of American Express Global Commercial Card. “This partnership enables American Express to provide corporate clients with an integrated system to make their expense reporting process easier. Concur is well known around the world for being a leader in expense management services, and we have tremendous respect for their vision, product capabilities and management talent. This is a win-win for both of our companies – and, most importantly, for our customers.”
“Concur is setting the agenda in the T&E expense management market by continuously improving the end-user experience through market leading innovation, while driving down the cost of doing business for our customers,” said Steve Singh, Chairman & CEO of Concur. “Our partnership with American Express expands our market presence and broadens our distribution capacity. This is tremendous validation of Concur’s industry-leading on-demand services, and we look forward to working with American Express to help our clients drive even more cost out of their businesses.”
American Express will continue to provide spending data to customers that opt to use other expense-reporting systems. Concur will continue to interoperate with other corporate payment solutions. Currently, about 50% of Concur’s existing clients use the American Express Corporate Card.
