Most companies would never let every employee buy their own Microsoft 365 licence, choose any subscription tier and submit a screenshot to finance afterward. Yet this is still close to how international mobile data is managed.

A traveller turns on roaming, buys a local SIM or downloads a consumer eSIM. The company may receive a receipt, but it cannot easily see who has access, whether the allowance fits the trip, how much has been used or whether that access should still exist.

The better way to understand enterprise travel connectivity is not as another tariff. It is as seat management for mobile data.

Mobile data is still treated like a receipt

Consumer eSIMs removed much of the physical inconvenience from travel connectivity. Installation became digital, plans could be bought before departure and airport SIM queues became optional. For businesses, however, easier purchasing also made decentralized buying easier: more employees, more providers and more reimbursement routes.

Corporate eSIM platforms are closing that gap. Holafly Business Center promotes bulk allocation, employee profiles, usage dashboards and monthly billing. Nomad Enterprise lets administrators purchase eSIMs, assign them to employees, monitor consumption and generate invoices through a central portal.

READ MORE: A Simple Way to Manage Corporate eSIMs Globally? It’s Called OneBalance

That is progress, but it still often begins with the plan: buy packages, distribute them, repeat. SaaS management begins with the user, role and policy.

The seat-management lesson

Microsoft 365 administrators can assign or remove licences for users and groups, while group-based licensing can automatically provide access to everyone in a defined security group. Google Workspace supports licence management at organizational, group and individual levels. Access follows the employee and can change with the employee’s role.

Companies learned this discipline because unused seats are expensive. Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, based on more than 40 million licences and $75 billion in managed spend, says organizations leave an average of 36% of licences unused against recommended utilization levels. It is vendor research, not a census of every enterprise, but the lesson is credible: provision without visibility and waste follows.

Mobile data is not identical to software access. It is consumable, location-dependent and affected by networks and devices. Still, the management questions are similar. Who needs it? For how long? Under which budget? Can unused capacity be reassigned rather than abandoned?

OneBalance turns a wallet into a control layer

Yesim’s OneBalance applies much of this logic without requiring a separate fixed package for every traveller.

A company funds one shared balance, links employees’ Yesim accounts and allocates funds to individual users. Administrators can adjust allocations, monitor usage in real time and export reports. Yesim says there are no platform fees and customers pay for the data their teams use. It also promotes one reusable eSIM across more than 200 destinations, with optional add-ons for less common markets.

Consider three employees travelling to different events. One needs maps and messaging in Vienna. Another is uploading video from Dubai. The third has a trip cancelled. With conventional prepaid plans, the company may buy three bundles before knowing the real requirement. With a shared balance, it can start with controlled allocations, increase one traveller’s budget during the trip and avoid funding the cancelled journey.

READ MORE: Enterprise eSIM: The Buyer’s Guide to Global Workforce Connectivity

That is closer to rightsizing a SaaS seat than distributing travel vouchers. The value is not merely cheaper data. It is the ability to treat connectivity as an adjustable entitlement rather than a one-off purchase.

OneBalance also connects corporate funding to the employee’s existing Yesim account and app. The traveller keeps a familiar interface while the employer manages the budget centrally. The employee gets online; finance governs the spend. That division is overdue.

The market is splitting into different models

OneBalance is not the only attempt to centralize business eSIM management, and the differences matter.

HoIafly Business Center leans toward predictable unlimited-data access. Its public offer advertises unlimited plans from €3 per day across more than 160 destinations, alongside bulk assignment, profile hierarchies and monthly billing. That can suit teams whose priority is keeping heavy users online without repeatedly adjusting allowances.

Nomad Enterprise follows a more conventional portal model: purchase plans, allocate eSIMs, monitor usage and consolidate administration. It may suit companies that want structured provisioning but still prefer destination or allowance-based packages.

GigSky goes deeper into managed connectivity and IoT. Its Enterprise Manager supports per-SIM and user-group limits, country-level controls, traffic filtering and network diagnostics. That is more appropriate for connected fleets, aviation operations or mission-critical devices than for a company funding employee smartphones abroad.

Yesim occupies a useful middle ground: lighter than an enterprise IoT stack, but more governable than asking each traveller to shop independently.

The next step is policy, not another dashboard

The SaaS analogy also exposes what corporate travel connectivity still needs to prove.

Mature software management can connect access to identity systems, departments and employee lifecycle events. A new hire can receive the correct tools automatically; a departing employee can lose access without someone opening six admin panels. BetterCloud, for example, markets automated licence reclamation during offboarding and role changes as a core capability.

Yesim’s public OneBalance materials explain allocation, monitoring, reporting and centralized billing, but they do not currently detail SSO, SCIM, HR-system integrations, cost-centre rules, trip-based provisioning or multi-level approvals. That does not prove these capabilities are absent from private arrangements. It means buyers should ask.

READ MORE: The Hidden Cost of Employees Buying Their Own Travel Data

The stronger version of this model would not require an administrator to watch every traveller manually. Connectivity could be assigned when a trip is approved, adjusted according to destination and role, and withdrawn when the journey ends. Finance would set the policy; the platform would handle routine decisions.

There is a privacy boundary, too. Companies need spending visibility, not a surveillance tool wearing an eSIM badge. Good governance should show allocation and consumption without turning every trip into unnecessary location tracking.

Conclusion: The real product is control

The larger market signal is that business eSIMs are moving beyond digital SIM delivery. The competitive layer is becoming allocation, policy, reporting and lifecycle management — where SaaS platforms created value after software moved to the cloud.

OneBalance expresses that shift clearly. Its shared-balance approach is especially sensible for small and mid-sized organizations with uneven travel patterns. Companies wanting unlimited daily certainty may prefer Holafly’s model, while complex device estates will need controls closer to GigSky’s enterprise stack.

For Yesim, the opportunity is bigger than selling corporate data. It is to make mobile access behave like every other managed enterprise resource. Real-time allocation is a strong start. Integrations, automation and policy depth will determine whether OneBalance remains a convenient company wallet or becomes an operating system for workforce connectivity.