When one of our customer support executives emailed me with a simple question he got from one of our central bookers (quoting it as is):
“I have full-time and contract-based employees. In some situations, I want them to use corporate cards we issue, a company card, or use their own cards and go through manual reimbursement. I don’t know what I want to do until I am in that particular situation.”
It was just an email with a vague question. But anyone who has built for corporate travel knows exactly how much is packed into that sentence.
It’s obvious that there is a problem the customer is facing that drains their time and energy. But do they know exactly what solution they are looking for? Many times – no (and this is one of those cases).
That’s when ITILITE decided to solve this. Flexibility was a word we all looked for, and that’s how Flexi Pay was born.
The Problem And The FLEXI-ble Solution
It didn’t take us a lot of time to figure out the problem. There were two things happening.
- First, the central travel booker is being asked to make a decision too early. At the time of setup, they have to choose one payment method that should work for everyone. But they know their workforce is not uniform. Some employees have corporate cards, some don’t. It’s an organization that is growing every day. So they choose something that works in general, not something that works in every situation.
- Second, the traveler is stuck in the middle of this uncertainty. They are ready to book, but they don’t know what they are supposed to use. Should they use their own card? Is there a company card available? Will this be reimbursed?
So they either wait for confirmation or go ahead and create manual work later. Neither option is ideal, but both happen regularly.
- And then there’s a third person nobody talks about, the finance or admin team on the other side. Every wrong payment choice becomes their problem. A reimbursement request to process, a reconciliation error to fix, and a follow-up email to send. The booker’s uncertainty doesn’t disappear, it just gets forwarded downstream.
That’s exactly the gap we wanted to solve.
Most payment setups in corporate travel are built around one assumption, that a company has one payment method that works for everyone.
Pick a central card, enforce it, done. Some tools let travelers add their own cards but treat it as an exception. Others automate payment entirely so the traveler never decides at all. They just weren’t built for the reality of a mixed, growing workforce where the right answer changes trip by trip.
We wanted to build something different.
What we built – Flexi Pay
We built something that lets people make the decision when it actually matters.
When a traveler reaches the booking confirmation page, they see every card available to them, color-coded so there’s no guessing.
- Green for the company central card
- Blue for a corporate card the company issued to them
- Gray for their own personal card
They pick, they book, they move on – as simple as that.
On the admin side, the travel manager controls which card types each user can actually access. No more one-size-fits-all setup at onboarding. And when someone adds a new card to their profile, a simple toggle lets them mark it as personal or corporate-issued, so nothing gets mixed up downstream.
Travel Admin > Payment Methods panel
For finance, every booking now carries a clear record of which card was used and by whom. What used to generate reimbursement requests and reconciliation errors gets resolved at the moment of booking, before anyone has to chase anything.
That’s it. None of our existing or new customers have to go through any new process or training for this.
One simple option to select what you need gives a lot of flexibility and ease of use. The name Flexi Pay made a lot of sense when we reached this stage.
Deploying a new feature is not the task when you are in a people business. So we had to wait a few weeks/months to figure out what we really solved. And whether it made sense to users.
And that’s where it got exciting.
Since launch, many companies have enabled Flexi Pay, processing multiple bookings across mixed teams, contractors, and regional employees who were previously stuck in the grey zone of payment uncertainty.
A random email I received on a Tuesday morning made many lives better. While thinking back, maybe we could have built a wowww feature or something people would call crazyyy – but would that make the process easier? Hard call. But looking back now, it was definitely a shot worth taking.
Who should care about this
Flexi Pay isn’t for everyone. If your whole company uses one central card and it works, this probably isn’t for you.
It’s exactly for:
- Mixed workforces – full-time employees + contractors
- Teams where not every employee has a corporate card yet
- Regional or newly onboarded teams still being set up
- Companies running wallets alongside personal cards for certain trips
- Finance teams tired of processing reimbursements that should never have been necessary
Basically, if travel payments are situational and vary by person, Flexi Pay gives bookers, travelers, and finance teams the flexibility they have been missing.
That central booker who sent us that email? They don’t have to answer that question at setup anymore. Because the answer is at booking – when they actually know.
Know or need? I guess both.
