In a world where Revolut, Wise and other big consumer brands dominate travel money conversations, Soldo flies under the radar. Yet talk to finance managers at fast-growing travel companies or teams that live on the road and a pattern emerges: when the goal is to control business travel spend, not just get a cheap FX card, many are quietly choosing Soldo instead of the bigger names. The reasons are rarely about flashy metal cards or lifestyle perks; they are about control, visibility and the way real travel expenses actually work inside organizations.
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A Spend Tool Built Around Travel, Not Just a Card
Soldo did not start life as a general-purpose banking app. From its early days it has focused on multi-user spending, digital wallets and permissions, designed for organizations with lots of people on the move. That heritage matters when you are sending sales teams to trade shows in Berlin, engineers to data centers in Dublin, or consultants to clients across Europe. The product is built first and foremost for controlled, decentralized spend rather than for individual travelers hunting lounge access or crypto trading inside the same app.
For business travelers, the difference becomes obvious on the road. Instead of one corporate credit card sitting in the finance drawer, Soldo lets companies issue physical or virtual cards to each traveler or team, and connect those cards directly to ringfenced budgets. A small marketing team flying from London to Barcelona for a conference might receive a shared company card with a clearly defined project budget to cover hotels, taxis and client dinners. Because that card is tied to a specific wallet and policy, everyone knows what is in scope and what is not before they even leave the office.
Where many bigger fintech apps market themselves as replacement bank accounts, Soldo positions itself as a layer on top of existing business banking. That appeals to travel-heavy companies that already have a primary bank but lack granular control over how trip budgets are requested, approved and spent. Finance teams keep their relationship with their main bank, but use Soldo cards and wallets to manage everyday travel spending in real time, then push the data into accounting and ERP tools when the trip ends.
The practical result is less friction in day-to-day travel. A company can keep paying rent, payroll and supplier invoices through its usual bank, while using Soldo cards for flights on a platform like TravelPerk, fuel at a motorway service station in France, or a last-minute hotel for a delayed flight in Milan. Travelers see a modern card and app. Finance sees structured data streaming back into the ledger instead of late, incomplete expense reports.
Granular Control That Matches How Travel Teams Really Spend
One of the main reasons some travelers and finance leaders prefer Soldo over bigger fintech apps is the level of control over where, when and how money can be used. Soldo lets admins set rules per card, per wallet and per group, covering merchant types, channels and geography. For a field sales team driving across Germany, a company might enable fuel and toll payments while blocking online shopping and cash withdrawals. For a design lead attending a week-long workshop in Amsterdam, the card could be configured to allow hotels, restaurants and local transport inside the Netherlands only.
This kind of control is particularly valuable for organizations where many employees travel occasionally rather than a small pool of frequent flyers. A charity running field projects in Italy and Spain, for example, can issue low-limit cards to volunteers with strict merchant and country controls. Soldo’s groups and lists features then allow finance to analyze spend by project or region so that flights to Palermo, bus tickets in Valencia and hotel stays in Naples all roll up into the correct budget line back at headquarters.
For companies managing travel across subsidiaries, Soldo’s multi-entity and multi-wallet setup becomes a practical advantage. Each entity can have its own main wallet in GBP, EUR or USD, with sub-wallets for teams and projects. When a consulting group with offices in London and Milan sends a mixed team to a client site in Zurich, each entity’s portion of the budget can be ringfenced in its own wallet. Travelers tap the same Soldo cards, but finance can later allocate which expenses belong to the UK entity versus the Italian one without awkward spreadsheets.
Bigger fintech apps do offer budgets and analytics, but they are often layered onto products originally designed for individuals. Soldo’s wallet structure, which includes main, company, user and reserved wallets, is explicitly designed for organizational budgeting. That difference becomes obvious when a regional manager approves a last-minute flight change or extends a hotel stay; in Soldo the extra cost can be assigned to the right project wallet with a couple of clicks instead of disappearing into a generic expense category.
Real-World Case Studies From Travel-Centric Businesses
The appeal of Soldo over larger fintech names comes into sharp focus in travel and hospitality businesses where employees are constantly in motion. Secret Escapes, the members-only travel deals company, has described how its rapid growth made traditional expense processes unworkable. With teams negotiating deals across Europe and staff visiting hotels to review properties, the finance team found itself chasing receipts and trying to reconcile credit card statements that arrived weeks after the trips.
By introducing Soldo, Secret Escapes moved away from a small number of shared cards and reimbursements toward a model where trusted staff could spend directly, within controlled budgets, while finance retained oversight through the admin portal. In practice this meant account managers visiting resorts in Greece or Spain could pay for site inspections, taxis and client dinners on their own Soldo cards. Photos of receipts, VAT details and coding notes were captured in the app at the point of purchase, so the finance team back in London could see committed spend in near real time instead of waiting for crumpled receipts to arrive.
Other travel-heavy companies use Soldo to tame what Soldo itself calls “nomadic employee spend,” the unpredictable costs that arise when staff are on the move. A mid-sized engineering firm based in Manchester, for instance, might have crews working short-term on infrastructure projects in the Netherlands, Portugal and Ireland. When a ferry is cancelled, a supplier demands cash on delivery, or a tool needs urgent replacement, site managers can use pre-approved Soldo cards with local limits instead of phoning headquarters to ask for a one-off bank transfer or using personal cards that will need reimbursement weeks later.
Even outside the traditional travel industry, companies with traveling staff such as software vendors, media production houses or field service operators face similar issues. They need to empower people to book low-cost flights, buy train tickets at short notice, pay per diem meals and cover unexpected costs without losing control. In these environments, Soldo’s focused toolkit often feels like a better fit than a multi-feature consumer app that happens to offer a business tier.
Seamless Expense Capture Beats End-of-Month Guesswork
For individual travelers, one of the main frustrations of business trips is the admin that follows. Days of sorting receipts from airport coffee shops, highway petrol stations and hotel bars can turn into rushed spreadsheets at the end of the month. Bigger fintech apps like Revolut and Wise have started to add receipt capture and notes, but their core product is still an account that happens to support travel, not a full expense workflow.
Soldo approaches the problem from the other direction. Every card transaction is an expense candidate from the moment it occurs. Travelers are prompted in the mobile app to add a photo of the receipt, select a category or list, add project codes and even capture VAT rates. On a four-day client visit to Paris, for example, a consultant might tap the card for a metro ticket, a lunch with the client and a hotel bar snack. Each time, the app can nudge them to snap the receipt and choose the relevant project, so by the time the Eurostar pulls back into London, the expense report is essentially complete.
This real-time capture benefits finance teams too. Instead of getting a single PDF card statement for a whole department at the end of the month, they see expenses appearing immediately. That makes it easier to spot unusual patterns, such as a surge in ride-hailing spend in Madrid or duplicate hotel bookings in Frankfurt, before the end of the trip. Because the data is structured, it can flow smoothly into accounting systems like Xero, Sage or Microsoft Dynamics 365, reducing manual entry and the risk of mistakes.
The administrative savings are not just theoretical. When every traveler books their own flights on airline websites, pays for low-cost carriers from secondary airports, grabs airport transfers through local apps and claims back hotel city taxes, a traditional manual process creates dozens of small reconciliation tasks. With Soldo, these micro-expenses are captured at the point of spend, with supporting documents attached, so finance teams can close the month faster and travelers avoid the dread of end-of-trip paperwork.
Integrations That Match How Travel Is Booked Today
Business travel today is rarely booked through a single channel. Companies might use a platform like TravelPerk for flights and hotels, arrange group transfers via local operators, and reimburse ad hoc purchases like coworking day passes or event tickets. Bigger fintech apps focus on banking features within their own ecosystem. Soldo, by contrast, positions itself as a spend layer that connects into the wider travel and finance stack.
One practical example is Soldo’s integration with TravelPerk. When employees book flights or hotels through the travel management platform using a Soldo card, invoice and booking data can flow back into Soldo automatically. That means a salesperson flying from Dublin to Copenhagen for a client presentation can have their booking reference, ticket cost and associated VAT all linked to the correct travel policy and project without manual retyping. For finance, reconciling travel invoices stops being a jigsaw puzzle and becomes a largely automated process.
Beyond dedicated travel tools, Soldo also connects to more than fifty expense and ERP systems via Mastercard Smart Data and direct integrations. For a media agency sending crews to film in Lisbon, Athens and Prague, this means card spend on airlines, camera rentals and local production costs can be pushed into platforms like SAP Concur or Workday with rich metadata attached. Instead of accountants trying to decipher cryptic card statements, they see categorized, coded transactions aligned with internal cost centers.
These integrations matter because modern travel is fragmented. Employees might book a low-cost flight directly with an airline, stay in a chain hotel booked via a global distribution system, grab a rideshare from the airport, and pay baggage fees at the check-in desk. Soldo’s role is not to replace every booking channel but to ensure that whatever path the traveler takes, the spend is captured, categorized and reconciled with minimal friction.
Why Travelers Choose Soldo Over Big-Name Apps In Practice
On paper, it may seem obvious to reach for a big brand like Revolut or Wise when setting up travel spending. They offer attractive FX rates, widely accepted cards and user-friendly apps. Yet many organizations with serious travel needs still choose Soldo as their primary tool for team spend. The reasons usually fall into a few practical themes that travelers and finance teams notice quickly once trips begin.
The first is predictability and control. With Soldo, finance sets the rules before departure: daily limits, allowed merchant categories, permitted countries and currencies. A product manager attending a tech conference in Berlin, for instance, might have a card capped at a specific euro amount, usable for hotel, transport and meals within Germany only. If they try to use the card for online shopping outside that scope, the transaction can be declined automatically. That clarity helps travelers stay within policy without constant back-and-forth with finance.
The second is the separation between personal and business finances. Many large fintech apps started as consumer products and later bolted on business features. Some companies are uncomfortable mixing employee personal finances with company travel budgets in the same interface. Soldo’s entire model is business-first, so cards, wallets and permissions all live inside a corporate context. A sales executive can have a personal Wise card for holidays and a Soldo card for business trips, lowering the risk of accidental cross-over and making life easier at tax time.
The third is operational resilience. For a company running annual sales kickoffs in different European cities or rotating project teams through client sites, having a dedicated spend management platform means travel processes can be standardized globally. Training new staff consists of showing them how to use their Soldo card and app, what receipts to capture and how to select the right project or cost center. If the company later adds another travel management platform or changes its main bank, Soldo can stay in place as the consistent layer handling day-to-day spend.
The Takeaway
Soldo is never going to dominate airport billboard advertising in the way bigger fintech brands do. Its story is quieter, and more focused on the unglamorous side of travel: approvals, budgets, VAT rates and reconciliations. Yet for organizations that send people on the road every week, that is exactly where the pain lies. The ability to issue controlled cards to every traveler, ringfence budgets in wallets, capture receipts on the spot and feed structured data into accounting systems solves problems that a general-purpose banking app often leaves untouched.
For many teams, the most convincing argument in favor of Soldo comes after a few real trips. A regional sales team returns from a trade fair in Munich with all hotel invoices, taxi receipts and stand expenses already in the system, coded and attached to the right project. Finance closes the month without frantic email chases. Travelers are reimbursed for out-of-pocket items quickly because the data is already there. At that point, the appeal of a dedicated travel spend platform over a big-name consumer fintech app stops being theoretical and becomes part of how the business works.
That does not mean Soldo is right for every traveler. Solo digital nomads paying for coworking spaces in Bali or backpackers hopping across Southeast Asia might still find a personal Wise or Revolut card simpler. But for companies that view travel as an extension of their operations rather than a perk, Soldo’s business-first architecture has clear advantages. It is built not for the Instagram moment at the departure gate, but for the financial discipline that makes the next trip possible.
FAQ
Q1. Is Soldo available to individual travelers, or only to businesses?
Soldo is designed primarily for businesses and organizations. Individual holidaymakers or digital nomads normally use consumer-focused apps like Revolut or Wise instead.
Q2. How does Soldo help a company control travel budgets in real time?
Finance teams can allocate funds into specific wallets for teams, projects or trips, then issue cards tied to those wallets. As travelers spend, transactions appear instantly, with limits and rules enforced automatically.
Q3. Can Soldo save money on foreign exchange compared with other fintech cards?
Soldo is competitive on FX for many use cases, but its main value is control and visibility rather than chasing the absolute lowest conversion fee. Many companies pair it with a bank that offers favorable FX for funding.
Q4. How does Soldo compare to Revolut or Wise for reimbursing employees?
Instead of relying heavily on reimbursements, Soldo encourages issuing controlled company cards so staff use company money directly. When reimbursements are needed, they can still be captured and processed through the same platform.
Q5. What kinds of companies benefit most from Soldo for travel?
Businesses with frequent or decentralized travel, such as travel agencies, consulting firms, field service providers and international sales teams, tend to see the most benefit from Soldo’s structure.
Q6. Does Soldo integrate with travel booking tools?
Yes. Soldo connects with modern travel management platforms, so bookings made with Soldo cards can send invoice and trip data back into Soldo, simplifying reconciliation for finance teams.
Q7. How hard is it to roll Soldo out to a traveling workforce?
Implementation is typically straightforward. Admins set up entities, wallets and card rules, then issue cards and train staff to capture receipts with the mobile app. Many companies roll it out team by team over a few weeks.
Q8. Can Soldo support multi-currency travel across different regions?
Soldo supports main wallets in major currencies such as GBP, EUR and USD. Companies operating in several regions can fund separate wallets and issue cards to draw on the appropriate currency for each trip.
Q9. What happens if a traveler loses a Soldo card while abroad?
Cards can be frozen or cancelled instantly from the admin console or app. A replacement can be issued, and in the meantime virtual cards or other team cards can be used within policy to keep the trip running.
Q10. Is Soldo suitable for small teams, or only for large enterprises?
Soldo is used by both small and large organizations. Even a team of ten that travels regularly can benefit from controlled cards, wallet-based budgets and automated expense capture compared with manual reimbursement processes.