Onboarding of a Large Investment Firm
Background
Cowen International investment management segment offers actively managed alternative investment products. Founded in 1918, the firm is headquartered in New York and has offices worldwide. Cowen and company offers a range of investment banking services, including equity, equity linked and debt financing's, mergers and acquisitions and advisory services. Key target sectors include, consumer, energy, healthcare, information technology services and media and telecommunication.
On August 2, 2022, Toronto Dominican Bank announced it would acquire Cowen International for US$1.3 billion. The acquisition was later finalised in March 2023.
In September 2022, Cowen International tendered the travel management services category for its UK, European and Hong Kong operations. In December 2022, Chapman & Carter Travel Management was awarded the contract based on a mutual alignment of their objectives and overall service visions, onboarding and implementation commenced early January 2023 and the account has now been successfully trading for 6 months.
Challenges with incumbent agency
Turnaround time for offline travel booking requests.
Integration of existing hotel negotiated rates within both the offline and online booking environments.
Air fare pricing in particular with British Airways which equated to around 74% of the company's overall air expenditure. Travellers were frequently finding lower pricing through researching on the internet.
Incorrect account allocation for travel invoices.
Insufficient upkeep of existing traveller profiles.
Implementation
A key travel stakeholder team was formed which featured key bookers, corporate brokers, HR and finance. Weekly calls scheduled to update the Cowen International team on the progress of the account implementation.
Cowen International opted to take our single sign on travel platform for travel profiles, self-booking, duty of care dashboard and data hub.
Cowen International already had a well-established hotel programme that featured 58 properties across 25 of their most frequently visited destinations. Many of these hotel contracts had been negotiated by their US travel agency. As part of the onboarding process, we provided our rate loading details to each property and carried out stringent testing to ensure that they were then displaying within our global booking estate.
An additional 3 properties were added to the hotel programme the Liverpool Street and Mayfair location in London.
Integration of Cowen lnternational's existing travel policy and consultancy around the current two-tier policy that was in place. A recommendation was made to incentivise travellers to incorporate a Saturday night stay for travel to the United States (the Saturday night stay rule can often result in savings in excess of 38% within the premium cabins).
Cowen International decided to have a complete fresh approach to their travel profiles and we created a dedicated self-registration link that was valid for a period of 21 days.
Dual travel accounts were setup for all 5 of Cowen lnternational's business divisions.
Each traveller profile had a number of static reference field entries including cost centres, employee ID's, office location, job title and approver names.
Travellers all had their own individual American Express cards that were tokenised within our profile system.
Setup of automated approval tool with all trips being sent to Cowen lnternational's COO and Head of Risk.
Additional approval for any traveller wishing to stay more than 10 nights in destination.
Enrolment onto British Airways BA on Business programme for Cowen International and integration into our self-booking portal.
Cowen International had a very high online adoption rate of 77% with their incumbent agency and part of the transition to Chapman & Carter, meant them transitioning onto our Lightning online self-booking tool.
Travel booker/traveller training took place both virtually via Microsoft Teams and onsite at Cowen lnternational's London HQ in Snowden Street.
A daily hand-off of PNR's to International SOS.
Results
Client Feedback
View all TestimonialsWe had been working with our incumbent agency for over 8 years and implementing a new travel management solution, always seemed a daunting task. We have been extremely satisfied by the hands-on approach that Nick and his team have provided from point of implementation to the handling of day-to-day booking requests. Chapman & Carter's single sign on technology suite is very simple and easy to utilise and we have had very positive feedback from our key travel stakeholder groups within the business