Go-to-Market Engineer

Perk selects Katanox to improve hotel payments, financial infrastructure & distribution of corporate travel. Summary. Perk partners with Katanox to integrate AI-native travel management with unified hospitality payments and distribution infrastructure. The collaboration streamlines hotel bookings by embedding payments, automating reconciliation and settlement, and expands Perk's hotel network and loyalty content. It reduces reliance on virtual cards and manual workflows, enhancing expense automation and operational efficiency. * The partnership connects Perk's AI-native travel and spend platform with Katanox's hospitality payments and distribution rails. * Perk travelers will benefit from better content (including loyalty), embedded hotel payments (removing guest friction points), and enhanced expense automation. Amsterdam, Boston, and London, September 22, 2026 - Katanox, the financial infrastructure for hospitality, today announced a strategic partnership with Perk (formerly TravelPerk), the intelligent AI-native platform for travel and spend management. Through the partnership, Perk will use Katanox to improve the way hotel stays are booked, paid, reconciled, and settled. The companies will also work together to expand Perk's access to hotel partners through the Katanox platform. Improving the corporate travel experience The partnership comes as corporate travel, spend management, and hospitality payments continue to converge. Perk has recently expanded beyond travel into a broader travel, spend, and events platform, supported by AI-native automation and a reported $300 million private credit facility to fuel growth. Katanox gives Perk the financial infrastructure to support that growth in hospitality. This comes as global business travel spending is forecast to reach a record $1.71 trillion USD in 2026, with worldwide business trips expected to surpass 1.84 billion, according to the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA). For travel management companies and corporate travel platforms, hotel payments remain one of the least efficient parts of the booking lifecycle. Legacy workflows often rely on virtual credit cards, manual reconciliation, fragmented settlement data, and disconnected systems. Katanox replaces that complexity with a more direct model. Its platform unifies B2B payments, reconciliation, settlement, and connectivity, so bookings and funds move through a single system. Hotels receive faster, guaranteed payouts and cleaner settlement data, while travel management companies and corporate travel platforms reduce operational overhead and improve payment control. "Hotel booking is changing, and there's a huge opportunity to make the experience smarter from end to end. Not just for the travelers, but for the hotels they stay with," said Brina Wadsworth, Senior Director, Global Hotel Supplier Partnerships at Perk. "Katanox helps us connect the dots between hotel content, payments, and settlement, while giving us new ways to build more direct relationships with our hotel partners. That's really exciting. It adds flexibility to continuously improve the traveler experience while building a hotel ecosystem that is easier to connect, scale, and innovate." Katanox's account-to-account payment infrastructure helps reduce dependency on card-based workflows and removes avoidable payment friction from hotel bookings. For Perk, this creates a stronger foundation for scaling hotel content, improving financial operations, and giving customers even more control over travel spend. Building the foundation for growth The partnership also supports Perk's broader mission. Every trip, expense report, and event comes with an endless stream of invisible tasks, the work behind the work that eats up time but never counts as real output. Perk calls this shadow work, and its mission is to remove it so teams can focus on real work with real impact. That's why Perk's platform uses AI to automate policy, budgeting, expenses, receipts, and approvals across travel, spend, and events. Katanox brings the same infrastructure-first approach to hospitality payments and distribution, helping Perk automate hotel transactions from booking to settlement. For Katanox, the partnership reinforces the company's role as the financial infrastructure layer for modern hospitality commerce. Katanox connects hotels and travel agents through a single platform, with payments, reconciliation, settlement, and distribution designed to work together rather than as separate workflows. "Perk was the first travel management company Katanox spoke with when we began introducing our platform to the TMC community. I still remember our first meeting in early 2022, so officially working together is a testament to the work we put in, and the partnership we have built with the broader Perk team," said Paul Beukers, CEO & Co-founder of Katanox. "From the start, it was clear that modern travel platforms need more than access to inventory - they need reliable payment and financial infrastructure underneath every transaction. That is exactly what Katanox provides: hospitality payments that are easier to manage, reconcile, and scale, while creating new direct opportunities between Perk and hotel partners." Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is an intelligent AI-native platform for travel and spend management, built to eliminate the hidden, manual tasks that drain productivity and morale - what Perk calls shadow work. By automating travel bookings, expenses, invoice processing, and events, the platform gives teams back time to focus on real work, with real impact. Trusted by more than 12,000 companies worldwide - including On Running, Breitling, and Fabletics - Perk is tackling the 7 hours of lost productivity per employee each week, a $1.7 trillion problem revealed in The Cost of Shadow Work report. Founded in 2015, the global company combines innovation, control, and simplicity to transform how businesses work today and in the future. Perk's mission is to power real work by removing the invisible tasks that slow teams down. Perk is a proud partner of the Audi Revolut F1 R Team. Katanox is the growth engine of travel, providing streamlined financial infrastructure that makes hospitality payments invisible. As distribution and settlement grow more complex and margins come under pressure, Katanox unifies connectivity and B2B payments, so that bookings and funds automatically move through a single system. Hotels receive faster, guaranteed payouts and cleaner settlement data, while travel agents and corporate buyers reduce capital strain and operational overhead. Built for modern commerce and emerging agentic AI commerce, Katanox brings certainty, control, and efficiency to every transaction.

Perk Spend ties AI, travel and corporate finance in US. Career Development Institute September 20, 2026 Finance & FinTech Estimated reading time: 5 minutes · Last updated: 19 September 2026 Perk has expanded Perk Spend into the US, connecting AI-enabled travel booking, expense workflows and payments on a single data layer. As first reported by FinTech Magazine, the US accounts for 30% of Perk's new business globally and customers using Travel and Events produce more than US$1bn in annual US transaction value. Perk says the platform routes bookings and receipts through an MCP server that supports AI assistants including Claude and ChatGPT, and that 96% of travel bookings and 90% of expense reports are handled with zero human touch. The launch aims to map travel activity directly into finance systems without replacing existing cards or ERPs. Bringing travel and spend together gives you much better visibility and control and lets finance teams spend more time managing the business rather than chasing data Roy Hefer, CFO of Perk Key takeaways. * US market share: The US accounts for 30% of Perk's new business globally. * Transaction scale: Perk says Travel and Events customers process in excess of US$1 billion in transaction value each year in the United States. * Automation rates: Perk reports that 96% of travel bookings and 90% of expense reports are handled with zero human touch. * Recent travel growth: Perk's customer data show domestic bookings increased by 28% year-on-year in the period from January to August 2026, while international return flights departing the United States rose by 14%. * Survey signal: A Perk-commissioned survey of 2,000 US employees found one in four US companies has no formal tool for managing spend. Table of contents. Why Perk is unifying travel and finance now. Perk traces the US push to two linked facts: scale and friction. The company says the US is already 30% of its new sales and that travel and events customers process more than US$1bn a year in transactions there. That volume exposes reconciliation gaps when bookings, cards and reimbursement processes live in separate systems, which Perk presents as unnecessary manual work for finance teams. Perk argues a single data layer spanning travel, spend and events reduces post-trip chasing of receipts and ledger mismatches. The platform routes booking and expense metadata into ERP connectors and claims this automated flow is the reason 96% of travel bookings and 90% of expense reports are processed without human intervention. For finance leaders, Perk positions that visibility as the mechanism that shifts effort away from reconciliation and toward budget control and policy enforcement. How Perk Spend works and what it integrates with. Perk Spend combines a central data layer, an MCP server that supports AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT, and native ERP connectors. The platform is designed to accept existing corporate card programmes via a Bring Your Own Corporate Card feature and to route approved out-of-pocket reimbursements directly into employee bank accounts. Perk lists native connections to NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, QuickBooks and SAP S/4HANA and says its API supports custom integrations across more than 50 solutions. Other product capabilities in the US rollout include automated receipt capture and coding, global per-diems that adjust by country and city for tax-compliant policies, and a future Perk Card planned for the US with spend controls, cashback and global payments. What this means for US finance teams. Perk pitches the US product as compatible with existing finance infrastructure rather than a replacement. That stance targets CFOs who want ledger alignment without ripping out card programmes or ERP workflows: Perk's NetSuite connector, for example, aligns travel and spend data with the general ledger to remove manual imports and reconciliation. The Perk-commissioned survey of 2,000 US employees underlines the addressable opportunity: one in four companies has no formal spend tool and almost one-third of workers still file expenses manually. Perk's automation rates - 96% of bookings and 90% of expense reports handled without human touch - are framed as the productivity offset to that manual workload, and features such as direct reimbursement and personal card rewards aim to reduce friction for employees while preserving finance controls. Partners, customers and scale signals. Perk points to its partner and customer network to show the platform is ready for large organisations. It lists Ramp and BILL Spend & Expense among its commercial partners and says Stadler Rail uses Perk's AI to handle expense management across countries, with staff intervening only to review exceptions. Perk also reports that up to 40% of new deals in Europe now bundle Travel and Spend. Those references serve two purposes: they show Perk working with card and expense vendors rather than displacing them, and they give buyers examples of integrations and live deployments. Perk's claim of more than 50 connected solutions and the planned US Perk Card indicate the company is both broadening connector coverage and building a native payment product, which together signal a push to capture a larger share of corporate travel and expense flows. How Perk's US push could play out. The case for. * A unified data layer plus native ERP connectors should cut reconciliation steps and free finance teams to manage budgets rather than process transactions, leveraging Perk's reported 96% and 90% automation rates for bookings and expense reports respectively. * Existing partner ties and a connector set covering NetSuite, Dynamics, QuickBooks and SAP S/4HANA give Perk immediate paths into large ERP footprints, while more than US$1bn in annual US transaction value from Travel and Events customers signals commercial traction. The case against. * Perk must convert organisations that currently operate without formal spend tools: its survey finds one in four US companies have no formal spend system, which may mean longer sales cycles or added change-management work. * Dependence on many third-party connectors and an MCP server that uses external AI assistants creates operational complexity and execution risk as Perk expands in the heterogeneous US finance and payments environment. What to be careful about. * Integration complexity across more than 50 connected solutions increases maintenance and mapping risk for finance teams. * Operational reliance on an MCP server and third-party AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT introduces dependencies that could affect uptime or behaviour. * Execution risk tied to the planned Perk Card for the US: the product is described as planned, not launched, and will require product, compliance and issuer arrangements to succeed. The bottom line. Perk's US launch packages travel, spend and events data into a single layer and leans on AI assistants and ERP connectors to remove manual reconciliation. The company cites US scale - 30% of new business and over US$1bn in Travel and Events transaction value - and high automation rates to argue the approach reduces hidden work in finance teams. Execution questions remain: converting organisations that still file expenses manually, operating across many connectors, and delivering the planned Perk Card will determine whether Perk captures a larger share of corporate spend in the US. What to watch. * Watch for Perk to announce availability, pricing and launch date for the planned US Perk Card; no date has been set. * Watch for Perk to publish case studies or adoption metrics from US customers after the Perk Spend rollout; no date has been set. * Watch for Perk to list additional native ERP connectors beyond NetSuite, Dynamics, QuickBooks and SAP S/4HANA; no date has been set. Frequently asked questions. What is Perk Spend? Perk Spend is Perk's platform that combines travel booking, corporate expenses, payments and events on a single data layer; Perk says it handles 96% of travel bookings and 90% of expense reports with zero human touch. How large is Perk's US business? Perk reports the United States accounts for 30% of its newly won business globally, and that Travel and Events clients handle more than US$1 billion a year in transaction value inside the US. Which ERPs does Perk support natively? Perk lists native integrations with NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, QuickBooks and SAP S/4HANA and says its connectors align travel and spend data with the general ledger and accounts payable workflows. Related reading.