By Vibhore Goyal
A CFO of a public company recently shared her frustration: “Our flight costs have increased 23%. I don’t know if we’re taking more flights or have the costs of flights gone up? How many meetings is our team traveling for? Which sectors do we fly more? Our expense system doesn’t tell me.” She went on to frustratingly add, “Our expense tool has 18 fields to fill when filing an expense. Our employees complain endlessly. These platforms claim to be mobile-first and user friendly. Maybe they were in sync with the demands of employees 10 years ago, but surely, no more!” She expressed her desire, “I want to minimise costs without giving the ‘feeling’ of ‘cost-cutting’ whilst simultaneously delivering a better employee experience.”
The employee experience has stagnated, and managerial visibility has collapsed. What was once compliance-first is now insight-last. Expense tools haven’t evolved in sync with today’s complexity. The impact is not just operational, it’s strategic.`30,000 crore lost. 20,000 frauds. And we still call it expense management?
Auditors, too, live on the edge—under pressure, underappreciated, and overwhelmed. In a recent survey of 25 corporate auditors:68% of physical bills had ink that faded; 96% of F&B bills over 10,000 lacked GST details; companies lost nearly5 crore in GST input credit.
And that’s just scratching the surface. Flights and hotels contribute nearly 70% of corporate T&E spend yet input credit worth 400–1,800 per transaction is often missed due to broken integrations. Policy non-compliance affects 7% of bills by value, while 2% are outright fraudulent. On average, it takes 18–24 months to detect these issues—and each costs companies `20 lakh.
When you scale that across the economy, it adds up to `30,000 crore in annual leakage and an estimated 20,000 fraud cases a year. The systems today are simply not equipped to catch these risks—let alone prevent them.
This is not just an expense management problem—it’s a disconnection epidemic.
Every bill holds valuable signals about pricing, policy, compliance, and behaviour. But these remain scattered across disconnected systems—T&E Platforms inclu-ding HRMS, banks, ERPs, OTAs, and merchant platforms—making true insight impossible.
Meanwhile, airlines, hotels, and mobility providers continue to market blindly, unaware of which customers are eligible, in-policy, or in-market. And businesses continue to lose out on tax credits, vendor leverage, and fraud prevention opportunities.
Consumer AI has taken a generational leap through Gen AI. Now, enterprise software needs its Cognitive AI moment—an evolution that understands policies, detects anomalies, and connects context across systems.
Startups are ready. AI engines exist. But innovation won’t flourish in silos. It’s time for banks, HRMS platforms, and merchants to stop building walled gardens—and start building bridges.
Businesses win when systems connect.
The author is founder, OneBanc