American Express has partnered with Australia-based fintech startup Bluechain to streamline the supplier payment process for SMEs. The two companies worked together to deliver an invoice-management solution that can help small business owners centrally manage, pay, and reconcile supplier invoices from a single dashboard on a desktop or mobile device.

The goal is to minimise resources spent on manual administration by offering a time-saving, simple billing and payment process that streamlines operations and automates tasks such as data entry and bookkeeping. The solution also allows SMEs to pay how, where, and when they want by offering better cashflow visibility. Following this partnership, existing American Express business customers can pay an invoice with their Amex Card, regardless of whether the requesting merchant accepts American Express or not.

Business owners can also link up their accounting system to Bluechain's platform for real-time tracking and reconciliation to benefit from end-to-end bill management streamlining. In the company press release, American Express officials pointed to a recent study, which revealed that more than half (56%) of SME leaders would benefit from more time away from the workplace. The study was conducted by Opinium amongst a sample of 500 business leaders in companies of 0-49 employees in January 2023.

In essence, the collaboration with Bluechain aims to automate invoice management and supplier management to give SME leaders more time to focus on growing their businesses. Bluechain officials highlighted their successful launches in Australia and the UK and described this new partnership as an important step for Bluechain to support a global audience. Other American Express partnerships In April 2023, American Express integrated with transit payments processing company Littlepay to provide riders with contactless payments.

According to the company press release, more than 250 transit operators that use Littlepay gained the ability to accept American Express, thus increasing the number of transit systems where American Express Cardmembers have the option to tap to pay for public transit around the world. At the time, Littlepay representatives emphasised that connecting the Littlepay platform to American Express marks an important step towards achieving their goal of providing public transport riders with payment choices. In March 2023, American Express partnered with payments provider Cuscal to launch a card bill PayID service in Australia on the New Payments Platform (NPP).

The resulting American Express Card PayID aimed to provide consumer and small business Card Members with an increasingly fast, simple, and secure way to repay charges on their American Express Card, directly from their bank accounts. .