Today in B2B: Accessing ‘Invisible’ Corporate Travel Bookings; Koffie Expands Trucking Innovation

Today in B2B payments, Grasp and Traxo team up to improve access to “invisible” corporate travel plans, and Koffie Labs expands into Georgia and Pennsylvania. Plus, how collaborative commerce boosts the consumerization of business payments, Crezco nets $4 million in seed funding and Higo brings in $23 million in fresh capital.

UK Open Bank Platform Crezco Raises $4M

London-based FinTech Crezco recently raised 3 million pounds ($4 million) in seed funding it plans to use for its international expansion and to build out its product suite.

Crezco calls itself the U.K.’s “first open banking payment solution designed to make B2B invoice payments as convenient as B2C card payments,” minus the costs typically imposed by major credit card companies.

Grasp, Traxo Partner to Find ‘Invisible’ Business Travel Bookings

Grasp Technologies, which provides corporate travel-based data management, consolidation, payment integration and data visualization, has teamed with Traxo, which offers corporate travel data capture and pre-trip auditing, in a move that will help Grasp secure more so-called “invisible” bookings, a term referring to the roughly 40% of business travel bookings made outside of the corporate travel policy.

Grasp will use Traxo’s technology to manage its own in-house business travel and becomes a Traxo Marketplace partner, meaning it gets structured travel data from Traxo’s corporate clients.

Koffie Labs Expands Trucking Innovation to Georgia, Pennsylvania

Trucking and transportation-focused InsurTech Koffie Labs has expanded to Georgia and Pennsylvania and announced two new distribution partners: Cooper Insurance and Associates and Fleet Risk Management/Assured Partners of GA.

Koffie, which started underwriting in Tennessee and Illinois in July, uses artificial intelligence (AI)-driven predictive models with underwritten safety features that have helped the company build insurance products for self-driving vehicles and other new technologies.

Mexico’s B2B Cash-Flow Manager Higo Nets $23M

Mexican B2B company Higo recently raised $23 million in a Series A round and plans to use the capital to boost its workforce.

Higo works primarily with small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to automate vendor payments, improve cash flow visibility and give a consolidated view of business-related invoices. The company completed its previous funding round six months ago and has since debuted a financing product to boost liquidity through an accounts payable extension.

Visa: Consumerization of Business Payments Starts With Collaborative Commerce

Ben Ellis, global head of strategy at Visa Business Solutions, recently told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that companies occupying various places in the financial services ecosystem focus on their areas of expertise, but it takes a joint effort — and a collective effort across the industry — to reimagine business payments.

Everyone, from the C-Suite to the sales team, are mulling ways to improve payments execution. The goal is to make it a strategic differentiator by incorporating embedded data within payments, making workflows more efficient across payables and receivables departments.