Brex, the expense management fintech, has launched an embedded payments tool to chase the potential the company sees with partnerships, expanding its reach beyond direct sales.

“This fundamentally opens up a big way of going to market through these other partners versus only selling directly,” Karandeep Anand, Brex’s chief product officer and president, told Banking Dive. "It opens up a massive time and opportunity for us" to capture a larger slice of the $1.5 trillion business-to-business payment pie.

The new Brex application programming interface-driven tool combines providers using various integrations, including Mastercard’s virtual card platform, which allows software vendors to integrate Brex’s corporate card and payments capabilities into their platform without taking on underwriting, onboarding, and credit risk, the company announced Wednesday.

The tool, called Brex Embedded, enables software vendors to embed Brex virtual cards with higher limits, competitive rewards, local currency payments in some 50 countries, and quick customer onboarding, the company said.

The fintech launched the tool broadly Wednesday, but it’s already in use by clients like Sabre, Coupa, DoorDash, Boomi, and ScaleAI.

Sherri Haymond, co-president of global partnerships at Mastercard, noted how large enterprises have transformed businesses in the digital landscape and the need to offer innovative solutions. 

The new Brex tool “puts corporations in control with a simple, safe and easy way to manage connected payments experiences,” Haymond said in a statement Wednesday.

The test programs the fintech ran with Coupa and Sabre materially shaped what the embedded tool needed to look like, according to Anand. 

Though the current solution is based on customer feedback, there’s an opportunity for the company to build out the tool, he added.

Issuing credit cards using an API is the easy part, Anand said.

“The hard part about building a fintech is, how do you do risk? How do you do credit modeling?” Anand said. “While we own credit card offering, we own expanding software, we also want to power hundreds and thousands of other businesses which want to embed payments into their product.”

Founded in 2017, Brex, the brainchild of immigrants, has built the corporate credit card for startups, he said. As startups like DoorDash grew, Brex created a software stack to orchestrate a growing company’s expense management, travel, accounts payable and procurement in addition to payment methods.

“When you're touching somebody's money, you are in a trust game,” Anand said. 

Having a global payments footprint has “hardened” the stack of payment solutions through the number of licenses, approvals, and checks the platform required, he noted.

“We co-create and harden with early adopters,” Anand said. “So, by the time it goes on, it is compliance-hardened, regulatory-hardened, and enterprise-grade before it gets opened up.” 

As Brex readies to become a public company — the timing depends on market condition — investments in compliance and regulatory policies become more critical, he said. 

Brex customers that used to be non-digital required weeks and months to get their workflow payments done, Anand said. A faster process improves user experience, he noted.

And for software partners, offering the embedded tool can attract more customers and create increased revenue through payments processing share, Anand said. Meanwhile, those vendors avoid the costs of building in-house risk solutions for know-your-customer and fraud checks.

“This is a unique offering in the sense it's not even win-win, it's a three-way, win-win-win across the customer, Brex and the partner,” Anand said. 

By Rajashree Chakravarty on Sep 19, 2024
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