Today we launched Perk Spend in North America.
On the surface, the idea is simple: bring travel and spend together so companies no longer have to manage them as separate parts of the business.
But putting travel and spend next to each other isn’t enough.
To actually remove the work between them, they need to understand each other.
That means knowing that a hotel charge belongs to a particular trip. Understanding the company policy that applies to it. Knowing who booked it, who needs to approve it and which entity should pay for it. And carrying that context through without asking an employee or finance team to recreate it somewhere else.
That’s the product challenge we’ve been working on at Perk.
And it starts underneath the interface.
One platform for travel, spend and events
Perk brings travel, spend and events together on one data layer.
That distinction matters.
Built on one shared data layer
When products are simply connected through integrations, information still has to move from one system to another. Context can get lost along the way, workflows break, and people end up filling the gaps.
When the products are built on the same foundation, the booking already understands the expense. The expense already has context about the traveler. Because Travel, Spend and Events share the same data layer, policies, approvals, travelers and company structures carry across the platform instead of being recreated in separate systems.
For a growing company, that becomes increasingly important.
A finance team managing 50 entities shouldn’t need a fundamentally different way of working than one managing five. The complexity may increase, but the amount of manual work shouldn’t have to increase with it.
We learned a lot about solving that problem while building Perk Spend in Europe, including in some of the world’s most complex tax and regulatory environments. Today, up to 40% of our new European deals are for Travel and Spend together.
Now we’re bringing what we’ve learned to the US.
AI that understands travel and spend together
Build the context once, then let AI use it
A shared data layer also changes what AI can actually do.
There’s a big difference between adding AI features to individual workflows and giving AI enough context to work across them.
At Perk, automation already handles 96% of travel bookings and 90% of expense reports with zero human touch.
Work with Perk through ChatGPT and Claude
With Perk’s MCP server, customers can work with Perk directly through AI assistants they already use, including ChatGPT and Claude.
Customers can use MCP-compatible assistants including Claude and ChatGPT to book and manage travel, submit expenses, work with approvals and access information from across Perk without jumping between systems.
You can arrange a trip and deal with the expense in the same conversation. Or ask for a view of travel and non-travel spend without exporting data from different tools and stitching it together yourself.
The important part isn’t that there’s a chatbot involved.
It’s that the AI has the context to actually do something useful.
Built for how US companies manage spend
Of course, building a connected platform for the US couldn’t just mean copying and pasting the European product.
Over the past nine months, we’ve worked with US finance teams to understand how they operate, what they want to keep and where their current tools create unnecessary work.
One thing came through clearly: companies want the benefits of an integrated travel and spend platform without being forced to rebuild everything around it.
So we built flexibility into the foundation.
Keep the corporate card you already have
With Bring Your Own Corporate Card, companies can connect their existing corporate card programs to Perk Spend.
You don’t have to replace a card program that already works just to get a better Travel and Spend experience.
Transactions flow into the same platform as travel, giving finance teams the context they need without another reconciliation exercise at the end of the month.
Later this year, US customers will also have the option to use Perk Cards.
The point is choice. We don’t think an all-in-one platform should require an all-or-nothing decision.
Get reimbursed without waiting for payroll
We applied the same thinking to reimbursements.
With Direct Reimbursement, employees who pay for something themselves can be reimbursed directly to their bank account once it’s approved, rather than waiting for the next payroll cycle.
Perk captures the receipt, matches it with the expense, codes it and routes it through the right approval process.
Again, the tech does more of the connecting so the person doesn’t have to.
The goal isn’t another spend management tool
US customers already manage more than $1 billion in annual travel and events transaction value through Perk, and the US now accounts for 30% of our new business globally.
As that grows, we have an opportunity to rethink what happens around those transactions rather than simply digitizing the same old process.
Because finance teams don’t need another dashboard to check.
Travelers don’t need another system to remember.
And companies don’t need more software that technically integrates but still leaves people doing the background busywork between integrations.
That’s what we mean when we talk about building Travel, Spend and Events as one platform.
The goal isn’t to put more work into Perk.
It’s to take more work off people’s plates.
Written by
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Chief Product Officer
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