Brex introduces built-in payment tool

Brex, a spend management fintech, has launched a built-in payments tool to leverage the potential the company sees in partnerships to expand its reach beyond direct sales.

“This essentially opens up a huge opportunity to go to market through these other partners versus selling directly. It opens up a huge window of opportunity for us to take a much bigger slice of the $1.5 trillion (business-to-business) payment solution pie,” Karandeep Anand, chief product officer and president of Brex, told Banking Dive.

The B2B payments sector is expected to be worth more than $1.5 trillion by 2027, up from about $953 billion in 2021, according to ResearchAndMarkets Data.

Brex Embedded, a new API-based tool, connects vendors with a variety of integrations, including Mastercard’s Virtual Card Platform, which enables software vendors to integrate Brex’s corporate card and payment capabilities into their platform without the risk of risk assessment, implementation, and credit, the company announced on Wednesday.

Brex said the tool will enable software providers to deploy Brex virtual cards with higher limits, competitive rewards, local currency payments in approximately 50 countries and rapid customer acquisition.

The fintech broadly launched the tool on Wednesday, but it’s already being used by customers like Sabre, Coupa, DoorDash, Boomi and ScaleAI. The embedded payments solution helps save 440 hours per year in manual ledger coding and thousands in foreign transaction fees per year, the company noted.

Sherri Haymond, co-president of global partnerships at Mastercard, noted how large enterprises are transforming businesses in the digital world, as well as the need to offer innovative solutions.

“We are excited to expand our partnership with Brex to launch Brex Embedded, which puts enterprises in control with a simple, secure and easy way to manage their connected payments experiences,” Haymond said in a statement Wednesday.

According to Ananad, the test programs that the fintech company launched in collaboration with Coupa and Sabre have significantly influenced the appearance of the embedded tool.

He added that while the current solution is based on customer feedback, the company has the opportunity to expand the tool.

Anand says issuing credit cards through the API is the easy part.

“The hardest part of building a fintech is how do you take risk? How do you do credit modeling?” Anand said. “While we have a credit card offering, we have a growing software product, we also want to support hundreds and thousands of other companies that want to embed payments into their product.”

Founded in 2017, immigrant-owned Brex created a corporate credit card for startups. He noted that one in three startups in the U.S. now uses Brex.

As startups like DoorDash grew, Brex created a software suite designed to coordinate the management of expenses, travel, billing and orders across the growing company, as well as payment methods.

Hardened platform

“When you touch someone’s money, you are playing a trust game,” Anand said.

Having a global payments footprint, he noted, has “strengthened” the payment solution set through the number of licenses, approvals and checks the platform requires.

“We’re co-creating and hardening with early adopters,” Anand said. “So the moment that happens, it’s going to be compliance hardened, regulatory hardened, enterprise-grade before it goes open.”

He emphasized that as Brex prepares to become a public company, with the timing of that being dependent on market conditions, investments in compliance and regulatory policy are becoming increasingly important.

Three people win

Companies that work with Brex that weren’t digital before took weeks and months to get payments through the workflow, Anand said. A faster process improves the user experience, Anand noted.

And for software partners, offering a built-in tool can attract more customers and increase revenue by taking part in payment processing, Anand said. In the meantime, these vendors avoid the costs of building in-house solutions related to risk, know-your-customer and fraud controls.

The Brex model helps turn payments into a profitable, risk-free revenue stream for partners while improving the overall quality of service.

“It’s a unique offering in the sense that it’s not a win-win situation, but a three-way win-win situation: the customer, Brex and the partner,” Anand said.