Fusion Exchange 2026: what we took away from London and Amsterdam

SAP Concur’s Fusion Exchange tour came to London and then to Amsterdam, and we were a Gold Sponsor at both. Two days on a stand is an unusually honest way to find out what finance teams are actually worrying about, because nobody walks up to a stand to tell you things are fine.

The Amsterdam leg was held at the Eye Filmmuseum on Thursday 25 June, in about thirty degrees of heat that the building handled considerably better than some of us did. Ankur Jindal, Ravi Sundaramurthy and Ashton Sundaramurthy were on the stand, along with colleagues from across the team, and we got through a great deal of Innovel-branded chocolate in the process.

The question of the year

The session that stayed with us was led by Cassie Petrie and Adrian Antony of SAP Concur, and it was titled Are you getting value from your expense management solution? That is a more pointed question than it looks. It is not asking whether the system works. It assumes the system works, and then asks the harder thing: whether the organisation is getting what it paid for.

Those are genuinely different questions, and the gap between them is where most of our work sits. A platform can process every claim correctly, pass every audit, and still be returning a fraction of what it could – because it was configured for the business as it stood at go-live, and the business has moved on since. Nobody notices, because nothing is broken.

What struck us was how many people at the event recognised that description immediately. Several conversations opened with a version of “nothing is wrong, but…”, which is very often the most useful sentence anyone says to us.

What people came to the stand to talk about

We went with four things we wanted to talk about: SAP Concur implementations, optimising platforms that are already live, integration with ERP and HR systems, and AI. Roughly speaking, the middle two dominated.

Implementation questions came mostly from organisations at the start of something, and they are the easiest conversations to have. The optimisation and integration questions came from people already living with a platform, and those are the ones with real texture – data that has to be re-keyed between systems, a month end that takes longer than it should, a configuration nobody has revisited since the person who built it left.

AI came up less than the volume of talk about it would suggest, and when it did, it was usually practical rather than speculative: what it can reasonably do with receipts and policy checks today, rather than what it might do eventually. That seems like a healthy place for the conversation to be.

The part that does not come across in a write-up

Events like this are useful to us mainly as a corrective. It is easy, working inside a specialism, to assume everyone has the same picture of what is difficult. Standing in a room with several hundred people who use SAP Concur every day is a fast way to find out which problems are widespread and which ones we had over-weighted.

Thanks to the SAP Concur team for organising both legs and for having us as a Gold Sponsor, and to everyone who stopped by. The Amsterdam venue was a genuinely good choice, and we will be back.