How TravelPerk & Pleo help Luno bring employees together IRL

As the world of work grows more distributed every day, companies are looking for simple and seamless ways to bring their teams together in real life. With employees spread across several cities and multiple countries, getting the team together is more important now than ever before. But it also comes with a new set of challenges when it comes to organizing, managing, and expensing travel for these valuable in-person moments. 

That’s where TravelPerk and Pleo come in. Together, we make it incredibly easy for our customers to book and manage real-life events. A quick booking on TravelPerk’s all-in-one platform combined with Pleo’s ability to match each receipt to a particular expense makes for a seamless planning experience. No headaches. No chaotic paperwork. 

We caught up with Byron Cowie, Head of Reporting and Control at Luno, who explains how the magic combination of TravelPerk and Pleo makes bringing people together IRL stress-free.

A spotlight on Luno 

Luno is a global cryptocurrency investment company that is making investing simple for 11 million customers in 43 countries.

To run their business globally, Luno relies on a distributed team spread across different continents. They run 9 offices in the UK, South Africa, Nigeria, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, and the USA. They call their teams “remote but reachable” — and they use TravelPerk to bring their employees together IRL. 

They also manage their expenses with our strategic partner Pleo, who help Luno’s financial team forget what endless travel receipts and reimbursement claims look like.

A time before TravelPerk

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the team at Luno had one credit card to use for all travel expenses. The company was small at that time, with only 4 people working in the Finance team when Byron joined back in 2018.

Soon, the pandemic hit and made any and all travel disappear. 

According to Byron, it was actually a big relief for the Finance team because of how much trouble travel expense management was at that point. “We had to monitor the balance of the card used for travel bookings and top it up. The problem was that many people booked on the same day, and it took quite some time for the deposit to reflect on the card. In the end, it could result in three or four days when people simply couldn’t book travel.”

And then in 2021, travel started to pick…