Merger Combines Six T&E, AP Firms To Form Emburse

Six corporate travel expense management and accounts payable (AP) solution providers are combining into a single company to form Emburse, according to a press release Thursday (Jan. 16).

Abacus, Captio, Certify, Chrome River, Nexonia and Tallie are merging together to integrate each other’s T&E and AP solutions. Combined, the new company will service 4.5 million users across 120 countries, reports said.

Emburse will be headed by its new CEO, Eric Friedrichsen.

“We are so much stronger as one company,” Friedrichsen said. “With significant scale and disruptive technology, we’re redefining how organizations view travel and expense management and AP automation. We will continue to actively support and will increase our rate of innovation on each of our six core expense solutions which are uniquely tailored for specific industries, company sizes and geographies.

“Coming together, we are now also able to share key technologies — such as real-time expenses, sophisticated data capture and extraction, and deep integrations with corporate cards — across the different solutions. No one else in the industry has the ability to innovate as fast with such a customer-centric approach.”

He added that Emburse aims to “humanize” the automation of T&E and AP operations while deploying machine learning and other sophisticated technologies.

The corporate T&E space has been the focus of consolidation in recent years.

In 2017, K1 Investment Management announced a $125 million investment to merge Nexonia, ExpenseWatch and Tallie all under the Certify brand, following the 2016 merger of Tallie and Nexonia.

Other industry players have seen significant merger and acquisition (M&A) deals as of late, too, with American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) acquiring several business travel technology firms, most recently being the takeover of DER Business Travel, based in Germany.

Earlier this month, Coupa announced the acquisition of Yapta in another initiative aimed at streamlining corporate T&E management operations.