Months after Uber, Lyft launches business profiles

Lyft integrates with Concur for easy expensing, but Uber offers several other providers

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Better late than never?

Lyft today announced the launch of business profiles today to make it easier for users to expense the trips they take for work.

Essentially, by adding your work email to your Lyft account, you can easily switch between personal and business rides directly within the app. You can also set up the business profile so that rides get billed to a separate credit card, receipts get sent to the work email inbox, and notes can be added to provide details of the trip.

So far, it appears that Lyft’s business profiles only integrate with a single travel and expense management provider: Concur. If you were going to choose just one, that’s probably the right one, since the SAP-owned company boasts 300,000 customers in 190 countries. But it’s worth noting that Uber’s auto-expense feature announced in early March works not just with Concur but also Expensify, Certify, and Chrome River.

I’ve confirmed with Lyft that Concur is the only provider currently integrated, though I assume they'll work on adding others soon.

Uber officially launched integration with all those providers last month, allowing users of business profiles to auto-expense the trips they take for business. But Uber’s business profiles functionality first launched in November, meaning Lyft’s only five months late to the party.

I’m inclined to think this comes down to culture: while Uber started out as the more luxury-leaning black car app, Lyft kicked things off with fist bumps and pink mustaches. While the two companies’ offerings have converged over the years, it almost makes too much sense that the former would be the first to tap into the business world. That would also explain why Cabify, a Spanish ridesharing app that just announced a new $120 million Series C round today, would also already have a business-focused offering, even though it’s much smaller than Lyft.

Late or not, Lyft has jumped wholeheartedly into the fray.

In addition to business profiles, the company also announced something called Lyft Mobility Solutions, which looks to be an enterprise version of Lyft. The service is billed as a solution for all kinds of business travel: to and from airports and business meetings, daily commutes, company parties and conferences, and late night rides. As to be expected from an enterprise offering, Lyft Mobility Services comes with account managers and data insights specific to the client.

Again, Uber from the start has been open to providing its business solution to the enterprise. The company says customers today include Salesforce and Goldman Sachs, though it’s unclear whether those are one-off customers or full-on enterprise clients.

Either way, the cutthroat battle between Uber and Lyft is going as strong as ever.