Life science companies rely on meetings & conferences to share their products and expertise with the medical community. In Europe, a global U.S.-based company that develops devices and therapies to treat chronic diseases was spending more than €45 million on meetings. In response to a changing business environment, the company needed to have crystal clarity into their meeting expenses, across travel, meals and accommodations, but they lacked an end-to-end process that would deliver this insight in an efficient, consolidated way.

The company has a longstanding relationship with American Express GBT Meetings & Events, and is a client of both the American Express Global Corporate Payments team and American Express Global Business Travel. American Express GBT Meetings & Events provides a wide array of business services to meet corporate needs, so the client knew to turn to us to build a streamlined meetings management process map and design a strategic end-to-end program that would give them visibility into their meetings spend.

Consolidating their meetings management with American Express GBT Meetings & Events gave the client insight across all meetings & events spend. To support data collection, we implemented technology where meeting planners enter the details needed to source and execute events against budget, making it easier to reconcile invoices and record savings after the event. Detailed end-to-end reports illuminated additional savings opportunities, and helped them improve efficiency and effectiveness of their meetings management process.

In addition, American Express GBT Meetings & Events and American Express Global Corporate Payments utilized their joint expertise to develop a process to simplify the client’s meetings payment process while maximizing the VAT (value added tax) recovery. Rather than having to register every single vendor in their systems, the client only needed to register American Express GNBT Meetings & Events, who handled all of the individual vendor payments, using the client’s payments account program.