Tech startup raises the bar in enterprise expense management
Happay uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and mobility to help businesses automate travel and expense management processes. Anshul Rai, CEO & Co-founder, Happay highlights how they are serving more than 4500 customers across 40 plus industry verticals
Happay is a pioneer in travel and expense management automation in the country. It’s cloud-based platform leverages modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and mobility to help businesses automate their expense claims and reimbursement processes, boost time and cost savings, achieve policy compliance and control and get rich insights into corporate spending. Funded by Sequoia Capital and Prime Venture Partners, Happay serves more than 4500 customers across 40 plus industry verticals – from the largest and the most respectable Indian conglomerates to the fastest growing SMEs and startups.
2018 was a significant year of growth for the startup. “A key milestone was the launch of the Enterprise Edition of our travel and expense management solution. This new edition is specifically tailored to the needs of medium and large enterprises and is power-packed with features that help enterprises manage expenses and reimbursements at scale from the cloud,” says Anshul Rai, CEO & Co-founder, Happay. With built-in security and policy compliance, enterprises are able to optimise costs and control leakage effectively. Furthermore, the centralised controls help enterprise CXOs have a single point of visibility into organisation-wide expenditure from any device at any time. The company plans to double its customer base by the end of 2019 with new solutions, new technologies and more strategic partnerships. “We are at present touching an annualised run rate of US$ 700 million in transaction volumes and our aim is to hit US$ 1 billion mark by the end June 2019. We are also expanding our footprint globally and plan to launch our solution in two more countries in 2019,” informs Rai.
Partnerships have played a key role in the growth journey like the recent partnership with Uber to help Happay users auto-expense the rides they take on Uber. “This partnership helped us open up the travel ecosystem and directly tap into the source of spending (the merchants). With such partnerships, we are able to ensure more user loyalty for merchants like Uber, ensure legitimate business spending for the corporates and provide employees with seamless product experience. This new partnership is helping our corporate customers gain complete visibility and significant cost savings on their ground transportation while at the same time increasing employee productivity and satisfaction,” states Rai, adding that they also partnered with HDFC Bank to launch a prepaid-card linked travel and expense management solution for Indian corporates. The solution helps corporates to track business travel expenditure, pre-authorise employee trip itineraries, approve travel expense claims, implement travel policies and view travel spend analytics in a single place from the cloud.
Happay delivers everything businesses need to manage expenses efficiently and in a single place. “Our full stack of solutions (travel, expense, cards, invoice, flexi-benefits ), our payment and banking integrations, our evolving set of features combined with the latest technologies such as mobility, AI & ML and global capabilities help companies get the best of expense management that there is,” mentions Rai.
The startup is focused on making lives easier for its users, from helping them manage expenses at any time (from the cloud), from any device (desktop/tablet/mobile) or completely eliminating the need to do manual data entry. “Our AI-powered capabilities such as auto-receipt scan, auto-import of data from SMSes, Gmail, credit card statements, travel apps such as Uber, etc., make expense reports a breeze for employees. Using our AI-powered policy and approval engine, managers and finance teams are able to approve expense claims, control leakage, ensure compliance and process reimbursements with ease,” explains Rai, pointing out that Happay also seamlessly integrates data with other enterprise softwares including accounting ERPs, HRMS, TMCs, etc., making expense management more connected and integrated.
Happay is mostly used by midsize to large businesses. Rai reminds that the cloud-based and AI-powered platform helps enterprises process expense claims and reimbursements 7X faster, improves employee productivity and efficiency by more than 80 per cent, eliminates leakage, gains a single point of visibility over organisation-wide expenditure, realises substantial cost savings and overall, creates a lean process for managing expenses.
Last year Happay won five award titles, including IAMAI’s ‘Best Prepaid product’ for the corporate card solutions, Silicon India’s ‘Company of the year’, Paul Writer’s Hot Brand for Innovative use of technology and Express IT award for Digital Solution of the Year (runners up). “Our proudest moment was being recognised as one of the fastest growing companies in India to join the Mayor of London’s India Emerging 20 (IE20) business programme,” states Rai.
The company also launched India’s first CFO Benchmark report on travel and expense management. The report titled ‘State of Indian Enterprise Travel & Expense Management 2018’ deep dives into the current state of automation in travel and expense management across Enterprises in India, the T&E best practices implemented by best-of-breed Indian businesses, upcoming T&E trends and the way forward for enterprise CFOs and CXOs.
Automation of travel and expense management has been really helpful for many people as it reduces efforts for business owners, reduces wastage of paper and helps in saving time as well. It helps to keep track of the travel and other expenses and it gets easier to find a particular transaction that you are looking for, it is just a few clicks away.