TravelPerk, the leading travel management company, needed to offer a wide range of HRIS integrations. 

The integrations would help speed up user provisioning within TravelPerk, enabling users to make travel bookings as soon as possible in the platform. Otherwise, TravelPerk risked a subpar user experience and potential “leakage”—users going elsewhere to make bookings.

The team at TravelPerk quickly learned that the process of building HRIS integrations in-house was extremely complex and required ample resources.

The process of building a single HRIS integration took TravelPerk roughly 9 months. They also needed to assign a product squad (i.e., a small team within the product function) to work full-time on the integration, which included collaborating with squads in other functions. 

Since they needed to add several more HRIS integrations to support their customers’ needs and prospects’ requirements, they were essentially left with two choices: hire additional staff to work on integrations or use a unified API solution to scale them.

They opted for the latter and began assessing unified API solutions based on factors like expected time to implementation, resource requirements, security features, and the ability to meet both current and future expectations. 

Kelly Jewison, a Sr. Director of Global Partnerships and Business Development, explains why they landed on Merge:

The team at TravelPerk built to Merge’s Unified API in the same amount of time it’d take them to build to one integration natively; from there, they were able to take 6 integrations live. 

This includes widely-used HRIS solutions, like Workday and HiBob, and lesser-known solutions that are popular with specific segments of their customer base in Europe, like Lucca.

Here’s how their HRIS integrations work:

1. Once an admin user is logged into TravelPerk, they would go to “Account Settings” and click on integrations. 

2. They’d then select the application they’d like to integrate with TravelPerk, which triggers Merge Link—an embeddable UI component that allows users to authenticate their integrations—to appear.

4. Once the user follows the steps outlined in Merge Link and completes the authentication flow successfully, TravelPerk takes the user to a configuration page where they can use filters to narrow down the employees they want to sync.

Once the user finishes adding these filters, they can click “Save & Sync.” 

This initiates an initial sync, where user profiles are created and populated with their first and last names, job titles, departments, and employment statuses. This data is also resynced every 24 hours, ensuring that all of the user profiles are kept up to date in TravelPerk.

By consistently syncing this data, TravelPerk can add new hires to the platform on time and—based on the populated fields—assign them to the correct Cost Center (or a predefined grouping of users, typically based on projects, departments, or other organizational structures, that have shared budgets for certain expenses).

This guarantees that users follow the appropriate spending policies; and it lets admins analyze travel budgets more easily and automatically assign users to any cost center.

In addition, user profiles are updated whenever their profiles change in the integrated HRIS. This can lead users to switch to different Cost Centers on time (allowing them to make bookings that fit their new roles) or get marked as terminated in TravelPerk automatically—preventing them from booking any travel.

Merge has enabled TravelPerk to scale their HRIS integration builds efficiently.

They launched 6 integrations with Merge in the time it’d take to build one natively, which has helped them go to market faster and save their product managers and engineers hundreds of hours every year.

Equally important, the integrations have improved TravelPerk’s customer experience.

According to Kelly:

“Customers that adopt an HRIS integration are able to add users 30% faster and don’t have to export files from their HRISs and import them into TravelPerk manually—it’s all automated on their behalf. This is a win-win, as the accelerated onboarding process lets us mitigate leakage.”

Finally, given the improved customer experience our HRIS integrations provide, customers that use one spend 79% more on TravelPerk than those that don’t. And since TravelPerk has added several integrations via Merge, they have a meaningful volume of upsell opportunities across their customer base.

So, what’s next in TravelPerk’s integration journey with Merge?

Kelly fills us in:

“We’ll continue to roll out HRIS integrations, and we’ll expand into new integration categories that benefit our users. This includes accounting and applicant tracking systems (ATSs).”

Given all the success they’ve had with Merge so far, we’re confident that these integration roll outs will go smoothly.