FRABA and Mobilexpense: expense compliance on three continents

Pain points and challenges

Employees at FRABA are scattered across international locations. Each entity has its own policies, allowances, and workflows to contend with. This can present a challenge when centralising or streamlining processes such as expense management, especially with regards to local regulatory compliance.

The Mobilexpense solution

Soumya Prakash, Market Designer Digital Process Transformation for FRABA’s CREDEMUS entity, shared that all types of employees use Mobilexpense in the company. Each FRABA location applies its own policies and rates for daily allowances and mileages, based on the legal rates.

The company’s Mobilexpense setup is standard. Direct line managers receive expenses for approval, and these are then sent to Finance team members for control. Regional Finance team members perform expense control functions.

With Mobilexpense, discrepant expenses are flagged to the approving manager and the controller. The entire approval, control and rollback workflow takes place within Mobilexpense to ensure quick and accurate reimbursements.

For their business travels, FRABA employees use Egencia. While the company has not yet integrated Egencia with Mobilexpense due to the relatively low number of travellers, the integration is being considered. Doing so would simplify their travellers’ lives, saving them precious time in their T&E process and improving its efficiency.

Aspects of the solution FRABA employees rely on the most

FRABA employees value the ability to use both MXP's desktop and mobile apps. This is highlighted by the company's 37.05% adoption rate of the mobile app. Consultants, who travel regularly, tend to use the mobile app, particularly in the US and China. Whereas “fixed” employees tend to prefer using the desktop app for their expenses.

Because FRABA’s entities are dispersed over three continents, it relies on Mobilexpense’s enforcement of both local regulatory compliance and its business rules. Each entity has its own policies and workflows in Mobilexpense. And all entities have a two-level approval in place. Once the approving manager has green-lit an expense, it goes to a controller following the four-eye principle. The regulatory differences between each entity make this compliance aspect particularly relevant.

As for the process, discrepancies and errors are immediately flagged. This simplifies the task for both approving managers and controllers. And the rollback functions of the solution make communication quick and easy, ensuring that valid expenses aren’t blocked longer than necessary.

FRABA and Mobilexpense

“It is important for us that the application be user-friendly even for people who aren’t tech savvy. And Mobilexpense has that edge, so I would definitely recommend it. Mainly for the transparency, good user experience and quick response times.” – Soumya Prakash

“The team understand what I ask of them. And, if they don’t, they ask the right questions. The response from support is excellent. And it’s critical to us because we are spread out across the globe.” - Soumya Prakash

FRABA recommends Mobilexpense to companies wanting more transparency into their employee spending, a user-friendly experience and reactive support team. What employees are spending company money on, how much, and why are all visible at a glance in the app. And the support team is quick to adapt customers' business requirements.

“The response time is brilliant with Mobilexpense. It’s critical for me that I get fast responses because there can be 20-30 people waiting for an answer. I find it very helpful that, if someone reaches out to me with an issue and I send an email to Mobilexpense today, I definitely get a response by tomorrow.” - Soumya Prakash