Challenge

Roomex was founded in Dublin in 2004 as a B2C travel technology company. In 2018, the company pivoted to focus on workforce accommodations, providing a hotel booking platform for companies with large mobile workforces such as crane operators, truck drivers, construction workers, and others who are on the road several days a week.

Roomex built a platform that offered centralized booking, payment, and expense reconciliation for this sector, which has different needs than companies that primarily book executive travel. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Roomex experienced substantial growth, as many of its users’ employees were deemed essential workers who continued to travel, and the company has only grown since then.

Roomex responded to that growth by modernizing its payment technology, switching to Stripe in 2022 to incorporate more payment methods and integrate with its invoicing software. At that point, Roomex realized it had an opportunity to improve another of its services: travel-spend management beyond accommodations.

Roomex had initially built a white-labeled expense management system using a third-party provider, but realized it should focus more narrowly on travel spend. Now, it wanted to offer an issuing product that would allow users to pre-fund a spending account and limit purchases to certain merchant categories. The company also wanted the ability to set custom rules for purchases and to issue virtual cards. The onboarding and compliance process had to be smooth, and Roomex hoped to substantially reduce support queries compared to its previous product.

Charlie Healy, Roomex’s director of product, had helped launch an issuing product in a previous job. This time around, he hoped to avoid handling the project in-house. “I did not want to have to go through the issuing process from scratch—you need a dedicated team of expert people to do it,” he said. “So our shortcut to time to market was really going to be finding the right partner with the right tech stack.”

Solution

Roomex selected Stripe Issuing to revamp its travel-spend management solution based on the company’s earlier positive experience integrating Stripe Payments into its platform. “Rather than reinventing the wheel, we wanted to leverage as much of the strength of Stripe’s tech stack and rule set as we possibly could,” Healy said.

Before even engaging his engineering team, Healy used Stripe’s documentation to start planning the features he wanted to have in Roomex’s issuing product, RoomexPay. Stripe’s rule set would allow Roomex users to set spending controls to block or allow certain merchant categories and set spending limits for a specific amount or time period. Roomex ran that feature set by select users to confirm that the product would meet their needs, then got to work developing it.

The company ended up creating five different rule sets that its users could choose from, allowing businesses to permit certain types of spending at different kinds of locations. “We used our industry knowledge and intelligence to put together rules that made sense for the customer, and then under the hood was an amalgamation of different merchant category codes and rules that we were able to build within Stripe,” Healy said.

Issuing also gave Roomex the ability to offer virtual cards that could be loaded into digital wallets, providing workers with instant access to funds, whether they paid in person, online, or in app. Besides eliminating the risks of physical cards—which can be lost, damaged, skimmed, or scanned—virtual cards allow users to switch rule sets as needed, with no need to reissue new cards.

Issuing also handled onboarding and compliance. Stripe’s regulatory status and modern tech stack means users can compliantly issue their first cards in a matter of minutes. And Stripe’s robust issuing technology minimizes the kinds of technical problems that had prompted customer support requests for Roomex in the past, including top-up issues and challenges with acceptance rules.

Roomex partnered with Stripe professional services to guide its implementation of Issuing and Connect, providing expertise to maintain momentum through launch. The team helped Roomex navigate connected accounts onboarding, digital wallet enablement in the EU, and Apple Wallet provisioning guidelines and compliance requirements for accreditation for Apple Pay.

Results

User adoption of card issuing doubles after switching to Stripe

Rolling out a new issuing product on Stripe, with better controls and the ability to offer virtual cards, has doubled user adoption of RoomexPay compared to its previous product. Each user is also issuing more cards. “They’ve given digital cards to more workers than they were comfortable giving physical cards to, so we’re more embedded with each of our customers,” Healy said.

Same-day onboarding for card issuing

Adding RoomexPay is extremely easy for current Roomex users. Healy notes that one user saw a product demo in the morning, went through Stripe’s self-guided onboarding process, and was issuing cards by 2:00 p.m. the same day.

90%+ reduction in support queries

The move to Issuing has dramatically reduced the time Roomex needs to invest in product tech support. “If we have even one query a week, it would be unusual—and when we do, it’s normally user error,” Healy said. As a result, the Roomex team can concentrate on selling RoomexPay to users rather than responding to support requests.

Six months faster time to market

Stripe’s issuing technology and documentation allowed Roomex to get to market fast with its issuing product. “We estimate that if we had to build that ourselves and integrate with a third party, it would have added six months to our time to market,” Healy said.