A lot is happening in the world of personal mobility, with new business models like car sharing, ride sharing, mobility integration and demand responsive systems like Uber making waves. Even within some of these new mobility models, we are seeing huge amounts of business model innovation. For example, car sharing has evolved from “station-to-station” only solutions, to also offer free-floating solutions where one can pick and drop off a car anytime, anywhere. We have also seen growth of peer-to-peer car-sharing solutions, where someone rents their personal car to others, usually through an intermediary IT platform; clearly a solution for those not as emotional about their car as me! We’ve also seen emerging “low-cost car-sharing” models, such as Citeecar, with rentals for $1.16 per hour in Germany.

We have not witnessed many innovations in the corporate mobility offerings in the past 10 years, but with Mega Trends like connectivity, convergence of the business and leisure market (called “Bleisure”), multi-modal integration and a young mobile workforce, this could all change very quickly.

So what is the future of corporate mobility? The Global Business Travel Association reports a market size worth more than $1.2 trillion, owing to increasing business travel in emerging markets in particular. We believe this market is about to flip on its head and consolidate due to new market and product solutions and new entrants and mergers and acquisitions bringing new competencies to the table.

For a start, when considering corporate travel, we notice corporates moving from analyzing the total cost of ownership (e.g., in managing their fleet of vehicles) to the total cost of mobility, which includes merging several functions within their value chain. Consequently, the boundaries between fleet, travel and expense management are blurring to the extent that in many companies the travel manager is also the new fleet manager, or vice versa. Corporates are merging the systems and the services required to deliver this; the systems are becoming cloud-based platforms and IT booking tools, and the services (e.g., travel management, customer service, and “content” such as flights and hotels) are becoming available on a self-service basis for the employees, through booking platforms and apps, for example.

A good example of this is the platform from Concur, a company that was recently acquired by SAP for over $7 billion. I would label Concur as the next Facebook of corporate travel due to the reach and potential of its platform, and the premium paid by SAP supports this conclusion. Concur continues to grow exponentially and has over 25 million end users from its 20,000 business clients. The growth of the company is impressive and could, in the future, challenge the business model of technology and distribution firms like Amadeus, who have access to 90 % of the world’s corporate flight bookings. But what’s to stop Concur from making its own travel service, thereby competing with Amadeus, travel agents, or payment providers in the future?

Whilst employees enjoy a more convenient service, the benefit for corporates is that the Web-based and mobile tools for booking, approving and expensing corporate travel are improving their organizational efficiency and giving visibility into employee compliance of corporate policy and traceability. In an ideal world, we would all like to fly business class and stay in the Four Seasons on our business travel, but not many companies allow it; these platforms are reducing such rogue spend and allow for rejection of the trip or justification from employees where they break such policy.

- Forbes