The travel 'nightmare' that's luring payment tech developers

• Key insights: Nium, which has a large customer base in Europe and APAC, is expanding card issuance to the U.S. 
• What's at stake: Nium is focused on a variety of business payments, but hopes to find demand from corporate travel, which is a large but complex market.  
• Forward look: Nium plans to use its existing European and Asian customers with operations in the U.S. as a starting point for its American expansion. 

Traveling for work is very common, but managing how employees book and pay for trips can be a vexing challenge. And that's attracting a new generation of payment products that are promising workarounds. 

"Booking can take multiple payments to get done," Anupam Pahuja, chief revenue officer of Nium, told American Banker. "And that challenge can be solved through virtual cards." The Singapore-based cross-border payment firm Nium has launched domestic card issuance in the U.S., enabling businesses to issue local cards in APAC, Europe, the Middle East and North America through a single platform.

It's not a travel payments play per se — Nium is targeting international processes that traditionally involve separate payment processors in different countries. But corporate travel is an early area where Nium hopes to pick up market share against incumbents such as American Express.

Even given worries over geopolitics, corporate travel is a huge business. More than 1.3 million Americans travel for work every day, and global enterprise travel spending totaled $1.6 trillion in 2025, according to Hotelagio. "Business travel involves a complex set of merchants, such as airlines, dining, hotels and rideshares, and can get more complicated with cross-border returns, payment acceptance challenges, and the need for constant change," Brian Riley, co-head of payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, told American Banker. "And with continued growth in virtual cards over the rest of the decade, there are many innovation opportunities."

Nium's pitch

Nium is relying on its existing global scale to boost its payment business in the U.S. Nium says it has issued 41 million card credentials in APAC, the Middle East and Europe over the past 12 months. The company supports single and multi-use credentials for physical and virtual cards. While travel is a big focus for its U.S. expansion, Nium is also hoping to issue cards for supplier payments, education and general expense management. 

The company argues a virtual card, which can be tailored for a specific use with flexible digital credentials, can better manage payouts across different regions than a mix of different providers. While there is a crowded market of payment companies that sell corporate travel services in the U.S., Nium is hoping to get a start from existing customers in APAC and Europe that have subsidiaries in the U.S. or travel needs within the U.S. Nium also recently partnered with Coinbase to improve its ability to offer stablecoins as a way to bridge cross-border payments that involve different currencies. 

"The U.S. is the last major market for us," Pahuja said, adding he hopes the ability to support a single payment rail for multiple suppliers and travel companies will ease the fragmented nature of travel payments. 

"With integrations, the more cooks in the kitchen, the crazier things get," he said. 

A tough trip

American Express, which has long made travel payments a large part of its business, has recently boosted its profile through partnerships, such as a recent deal with Chinese digital payment app Alipay to ease payments in China for travelers.

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More recently, American Express Global Business Travel, or Amex GBT, launched the Egencia AI connector in Anthropic's Claude, part of an effort to replicate human travel assistants with agentic AI. (Amex GBT is separate from American Express, following a 2022 spin-off, and is in the process of being acquired by Long Lake Management.) Amex GBT hopes to ease complex travel management by enabling AI agents to support business travel booking.

"Corporate travel payments have always been a bit of a nightmare," Gilles Ubaghs, executive advisor for commercial banking and payments at Datos Insights, told American Banker. "One trip and you're dealing with an airline, a boutique hotel, and some regional transit company, and each one wants to settle differently."

Travel management companies have spent years stitching together regional issuers and hoping it holds together, according to Ubaghs. "Most of what's happening in the space right now is really just an attempt to hide that plumbing from the corporate user," Ubaghs said

Virtual cards are the go-to fix, Ubaghs said. "Single-use cards locked to a booking amount solve the fraud and reconciliation headache, but running those programs across regions usually means juggling a pile of vendors," he said. 

Nium adding domestic U.S. issuance makes sense in theory as everyone's chasing the same single global platform dream, according to Ubaghs. 

"But the reality is that global orchestration is still crazy hard," he said. "Treasuries are worn out from vendor sprawl, and running separate rails for North America and Europe just ties up working capital." 

Even with virtual cards, international business travel will still be complicated, at least for the payment firms, according to Ubaghs.

"The underlying complexity of cross-border travel payments doesn't disappear though, it just moves from the treasury desk to providers like Nium," Ubaghs said. "Whether they can actually dislodge the entrenched domestic players and deliver on the 'one integration' pitch is still a very open question."