The travel bill is growing faster than the controls
New Zealand business and government tourism expenditure hit $7.3 billion for the year ended March 2025, up $262 million. Across the Tasman, outbound business travel volumes grew 12.4% in the first half of 2025, with Q1 alone up 19% year-on-year. SAP Concur data shows total ANZ expense transactions grew 14% between 2023 and 2024, with meals up 19%, mileage up 21%, and ground transport up 13%.
For decades, controlling those costs meant procurement doing what procurement does: negotiate airline deals, lock in preferred hotel rates, consolidate booking platforms. That model still matters. But the organisations finding real savings in 2025 aren’t squeezing another 2% off airfares. They’re attacking the less glamorous layer underneath: roaming charges, expense fraud, compliance errors, and the sheer clerical overhead of processing claims.
One in five expense reports has something wrong
SAP Concur estimates 15-20% of expense reports include non-compliant spend. Most of it is not deliberate fraud. It is unitemised receipts, duplicate claims, missing tax details, and the kind of sloppy paperwork that happens when someone is filing expenses from an airport lounge at 10pm. But honest errors are still expensive. Every non-compliant claim triggers a cycle of back-and-forth between the employee, their manager, and the finance team.
Paul Nagy, Chief Product Officer at Emburse, puts it bluntly: “Employee expenses generate an enormous amount of clerical noise. The constant back-and-forth between employees and approvers doesn’t just waste time and money; it creates blind spots for finance that allow real risk and fraud to slip through.”
Then there is the actual fraud. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found travel and expense embezzlement accounts for about 14% of employee fraud, with 2,700 cases between 2016 and 2017 resulting in $7 billion in losses. AI startup AppZen, whose clients include Amazon and IBM, claims to have saved clients $40 million in fraudulent expenses by catching what human auditors miss. The greatest hits include a dog kennel filed as a hotel stay, yoga classes submitted as client entertainment, and strip club charges disguised as a steakhouse dinner.
Roaming is the cost nobody manages
The most under-discussed leakage category is mobile connectivity. Business travellers have treated expensive carrier roaming as unavoidable friction, something to absorb rather than manage. Traditional roaming charges can exceed USD $200 per trip. Multiply that across a sales team doing monthly regional travel and you have a line item nobody owns.
eSIM technology is changing the equation. Prepaid eSIM data plans can cut costs by up to 75% per gigabyte compared with traditional roaming, with coverage across 200-plus destinations. The Ubigi-Tripsora partnership now integrates eSIM purchasing directly into the travel planning workflow, targeting the specific behaviour pattern where travellers book flights weeks ahead but leave mobile connectivity until they are standing at the departure gate.
Catching errors before they enter the system
The technology response has moved well beyond pilot stage. SAP Concur’s AI auditing systems conducted over 80 million automated compliance checks per month in 2024. The company’s new Expense Pre-Submit Audit Agent runs receipt checks before submission and flags discrepancies before they enter the approval queue. Its updated Concur Travel platform for ANZ includes an AI-powered Request Assistant that generates automatic cost estimates before trips are booked.
Emburse launched Emburse Assurance, which assigns risk scores to claims and catches missing tax details, non-itemised receipts, and payment gaps before employees submit. The design shift from post-submission to pre-submission checking is the key insight: it catches errors when they are cheapest to fix.
The tools only work if the organisation does
Here is the honest caveat. A July MIT survey found 95% of businesses report their AI pilots failed to generate any return. SAP Concur Managing Director Fabian Calle identifies the structural problem: HR, IT, and finance typically build their components of a travel programme separately, producing duplicated tools, inconsistent workflows, and unclear ownership. “Fragmented systems, slow approvals and manual workarounds leave employees navigating policies that make sense in theory yet fall apart in practice,” Calle says.
The organisations getting results, like One NZ, which estimates it would need 500 more staff without robotic process automation, have moved past pilots into production deployment with clear governance. The same discipline applies to travel expense AI. Deploying a smart tool into a dumb organisational structure just gives you faster confusion.
For any business with a serious travel budget, the question is no longer whether to automate expense management. It is whether the internal plumbing is ready to let the automation actually work.
Sources
- IT Brief: Business spending grows in 2024, while smart controls keep costs stable
- CFOTech: Why the rise of business travel in 2025 demands stronger expense controls
- Scoop: Tourism Satellite Account: Year Ended March 2025
- NZ Herald: AI can now catch lies on your expense report
- IT Brief: Emburse unveils AI tool to tighten expense controls
- TelcoNews: Ubigi, Tripsora tie eSIM data to AI travel planning
- IT Brief: SAP Concur adds AI agents, deeper card and travel links
- ChannelLife: SAP Concur unveils AI-powered travel solution for ANZ markets
- IT Brief: HR, IT and finance urged to align on corporate travel
- NZ Herald: One NZ’s AI agents cut calls, energy use and cyber fraud at telco