Digitalization & GIG Economy
Grab Taps WorldFirst to Power Seamless Cross-Border Corporate Travel Payments
Grab, Southeast Asia's leading online-to-offline (O2O) platform, partners with WorldFirst to build a one-stop corporate travel payment solution covering corporate virtual cards (VCCs), multi-currency payments, API integration and compliance and risk management. The solution eliminates employee out-of-pocket expenses and reimbursement hassles, simplifies travel expense management, and provides Grab with a stable and scalable payment infrastructure to support its B2B expansion.
Background: Grab expands from consumer services into corporate travel
Grab's success with consumers comes from connecting people, services, and transactions seamlessly. Its digital infrastructure connects consumers with millions of drivers, partners, and merchants in real time, supporting everything from rides and deliveries to payments.
Grab is expanding into business travel to meet growing demand for more efficient travel, transparent expenses, and convenient payments. This expansion allows Grab to grow its B2B business, build new partnerships, and strengthen its position in the corporate travel ecosystem.
Challenges: Managing Complex Corporate Travel Payments
Grab's corporate travel offering replaces the old pay-then-reimburse model and digitalises travel expense management for companies across Southeast Asia. This improves both financial efficiency and employee experience, but raises three challenges:
- Complex, multi-country, multi-currency fund flows:
Each fare moves from an enterprise account through Grab's settlement system to a local driver, involving multiple countries, currencies, entities and accounts. Exchange rates, service charges and settlement cycles all undermine capital efficiency and cost control.
- Greater need for expense transparency:
Every expense, including its category and department charged, must be clearly captured and directly importable into the client's finance system for reconciliation.
- Higher system and compliance requirements:
Corporate clients expect payment stability, data transparency, access control, risk management and compliance. This demands robust API integration, data feedback, permission configuration and abnormal transaction detection capabilities.
Enterprise Solution: WorldFirst's all-in-one global payment solution
With a payment network spanning 210+ countries and regions, 70+ payment licences and flexible API integrations, WorldFirst offers Grab an all-in-one finance solution that integrates multi-currency payments, fund pooling and disbursement.
- Direct payment, no more reimbursements
With World Card, employees pay for business rides on Grab straight from the company's VCC. Cross-border fares no longer need to be processed by currency.
- Faster, more cost-efficient cross-border payments
Multi-currency cross-border payments with 24/7 real-time FX conversion keep fees transparent and minimise conversion costs. Drivers get paid faster and more reliably—directly to their local wallets.
- Integrated payments and finance workflows
With WorldFirst's flexible API integration, Grab integrates payments into clients' finance workflows: every fare, including its category and department charged, is captured in real time and imported directly into the client's finance system for reconciliation.
- Secure transactions with compliance
Leveraging WorldFirst's global payment licence network and compliance and risk control, Grab delivers enterprise-grade security on every transaction, from identity verification and beneficial owner identification to end-to-end compliance monitoring, abnormal transaction alerts and risk control.
Benefits: Seamless payment enhance corporate travel
With WorldFirst, Grab delivers a more efficient, transparent corporate travel solution that streamlines global travel expense management. WorldFirst's ecosystem also connects Grab with more corporate clients, driving business growth.
Better employee experience through direct payments
With World Card, companies pay directly for employees' travel fares, eliminating out-of-pocket spending and reimbursement.
More efficient finance operations
The integration between Grab and corporate finance workflows allows every expense to be captured, reported and reconciled, driving transparency, automation and finance efficiency.
Transparent expenses and controlled costs
Streamlined processes, competitive exchange rates and transparent fees reduce FX losses and cross-border travel costs.
A new growth engine
WorldFirst enhances Grab's enterprise service capabilities through its global payment network and licences, enabling identity verification, transaction monitoring, abnormal transaction detection and risk alerts. This underpins Grab's B2B business expansion and unlocks new growth for corporate travel.
Grab is Southeast Asia's leading superapp, offering everyday services including mobility, deliveries and financial services. With a large consumer base and expanding ecosystem, Grab operates in 900+ cities across 8 Southeast Asian countries, serving over 50 million monthly active users.
- Industry
- Location
Singapore
- Company Size
Operating in 900+ cities Across 8 Southeast Asian countries 50M+ monthly active users
WorldFirst Capabilities Used
World Card
Multi-currency cross-border payments
API integration
Transaction data reporting & reconciliation
