Corporate Lodging Platform HRS Buys Expense Startup PayPense

Corporate hotel booking platform HRS has bought PayPense, as it pushes further into expense management.

Terms of the deal, announced on Thursday, weren’t disclosed, but the acquisition follows its purchase of billing company Itelya in 2021.

Staff at Germany's PayPense will officially become HRS Pay employees when the acquisition formally closes in August.

Interestingly, HRS now describes itself as a “global corporate travel and payment technology platform.” HRS, which stands for Hotel Reservation Service, said buying PayPense enhances its “growing compilation of efficient corporate payment offerings.”

PayPense is used by companies to let employees use digital payment technology to pay for all work-related purchases. That helps ensure compliance to budgets while also capturing relevant data for auditing, steering and even sustainability metrics, the company said. Using supplier and localized data, PayPense can capture carbon emissions of individual expenses.

“With the full integration of PayPense, our complete end-to-end spend management platform provides unmatched visibility of level-3 data, multi-category invoice digitization, and superior VAT reclaim automation — all available globally via any payment provider,” said said Kurt Knackstedt, chief growth officer at HRS Pay.