New analysis from Global Market Firm finds a promising future for the cloud-based corporate travel and expense management industry. But the report, published this week, also suggests that data security could trip up the industry’s expansion this decade.
According to reports on Monday (March 28), the Software-as-a-Service expense management industry is in the midst of a more than 19 percent compound annual growth rate anticipated between 2013 and 2020.
Key to this expansion is the rising demand among corporations to reduce expenses and operational costs, researchers said in their report. This means end-to-end expense management solutions are also gaining prevalence in the global market.
“End-to-end expense management solutions automate all components of expense management processes, such as travel booking, expense reporting, employee reimbursement and expense analysis,” explained analysts in a statement. “Thus, these automated end-to-end processes cover the whole span of the expense-related process — from travel booking plans to reporting and payments.”
The researchers added that SaaS vendors are flexing to this demand by expanding their offerings beyond solely expense tracking and into more sophisticated tools, including data analytics and spend analysis.
But the increasing dependence on Big Data and analytics to meet market demand in the travel and expense management sector is leaving room for security threats to impede its growth, researchers said.
“In a SaaS-based model, there is always a risk of information leakage, which could result in the misuse or manipulation of organizational expense data,” the research firm said in its announcement. “Concerns about data security can be a significant barrier for deploying SaaS-based expense management solutions.”
Analysts added that corporations are increasingly wary about placing sensitive data, like asset information, in the cloud.
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