Digital-native payments for the new models of in-person meetings
This is the first in a series of posts where we will detail the real-world applications and advantages of distributed ledger technology and digital currencies for travel and hospitality. As we have said elsewhere, very few people care or need to understand how TCP/IP works behind the scenes to allow you to send an email or pull up a web page, and the same is true for DLT and digital or cryptocurrency as they apply to financial settlements.
What matters for any technology is how it makes life for the user more efficient and less expensive. Here’s how Clear Chain applies DLT to the 3rd party payment requirements arising from emerging models of in-person meetings.
The growing category of in-person meetings of distributed workers is established as a new requirement for business travel programs and the venues that host business travellers. But if business travel is the new center of company culture, as American Express GBT describes, there has been a gap in development of solutions to manage the new paradigms, especially when it comes to financial settlements for the 3rd party vendor activities required to support this new model of in-person meetings.
Best practices for this new business travel category emphasize ‘blended’ or ‘extended’ travel that offers a mix of personal and professional interactions involving off-site activities including outdoor recreation, live entertainment, and dining experiences that are provided by 3rd party vendors. Planners, venues, and vendors are currently limited to using spreadsheets and archaic contract management tools and payment services to support financial settlements for those contracts – a complicated and inefficient status quo that didn’t work well before 2020 and certainly doesn’t work today.
Clear Chain’s digital-native payments platform fills that performance gap and offers all parties a low-cost, easy-to-use service to ensure that contracts are managed accurately and vendors get paid quickly, saving everyone involved time and money and freeing up users to focus on client engagement and generating new business.
Smart contracts and digital wallets operating on the distributed ledger are the key elements to the new solution. Smart contracts ensure the highest level of accuracy, transparency, and security for invoices, duty of care commitments, and other agreements. Direct wallet to wallet payments cut out middlemen and the fees they charge, as well as accelerating the time to final settlement, leading to significant and measurable improvements in cash liquidity for clients and vendors.
But let’s not get bogged down in the technical details here – our service ensures that bills are paid quickly and accurately, while retaining the most up to date and transparent data for reporting.
New business models require new solutions to manage processes and generate profitable outcomes. Clear Chain’s small meetings payments solution applies new technology to the new in-person meeting model to retain the guiding principles of saving money and making users’ experiences more efficient and productive. Please get in touch with us directly if you would like to learn more.