Data Plus is a US-based accounting provider focusing on the needs of hotels and other hospitality businesses. A typical customer of Data Plus is a small hotel chain that relies on various different data sources. With the help of Data Plus, the hotel chain can aggregate these sources and leverage the reporting tools of Data Plus to access the data in the most convenient way. The typical customer saves time and money and can easily comply with local regulations.
This week, Data Plus announced that it has expanded its existing partnership with Edenred Pay to create a new embedded payments solution for hotels and hospitality businesses. Previously, the small hotel chain using Data Plus had to use up to three or four different platforms to complete payment tasks or manage the whole accounts payable side. With the integration, the small hotel chain does not have to leave Data Plus for any payment-related activities.
While this obviously saves time for Data Plus customer’s and improves reporting, I found the three following changes due to the partnership interesting:
- Data Plus customers will be incentivised through an interchange kick-back model to use credit cards more often
- Some of the hotels are still using checks to make payments. But with the new integration, it is expected that many of them will switch to virtual one-time use cards
- Hotels will have it easier to identify invoice discrepancies and vendor errors, which will save money
Many of us (including myself) have no experience in the hotel industry, but we can easily understand that similar integrations can also benefit other industries. While such a story will not be on the front page of embedded finance news, it shows to me that it’s not just the big tech companies that get embedded finance.
