San Francisco-based FinTech firm Brex has publicly launched a fully localized cross-border corporate card aimed at servicing the Canadian employees of United States (US)-based companies.
“Canada represents almost 20 percent of those global teams that have already been onboarded onto Brex’s local cards and billing platform.”
Erica Dorfman, Brex
The new card comes with a unified system offering a localized card, expense reimbursement, and card payment collections, all operating in Canadian dollars. Brex said it introduced the new service after noticing that US companies with Canadian subsidiaries were joining its platform more quickly. The company found that the number of corporate cards being shipped to Canada has risen by over 10 percent year-over-year and annualized payments processed in Canada are up by over 15 percent year-over-year.
The new product rolled out in private beta over the summer, with around 1,000 users, and is now rolling out publicly, according to Brex. While it is currently aimed at Canadian employees of US companies, Brex intends to expand the offering to other countries around the world in the near future.
“Canada represents almost 20 percent of those global teams that have already been onboarded onto Brex’s local cards and billing platform,” Brex’s head of global financial products, Erica Dorfman, said in an exclusive interview with BetaKit. “It’s a huge market for us, so we’re really excited to have those teams on our platform.”
Dorfman said the cross-border card’s integration with Brex’s expense management platform sets it apart from other global card offerings. The integration allows companies to issue cards with the budgeting front-loaded, meaning expenses are automatically handled and reimbursed in local currency, eliminating the need for retroactive expense reports.
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This offering builds on the recent expansion of Brex’s expense management platform, Empower, to cater to US companies with a multinational presence. It also follows a strategic pivot of the company’s target customer base: in June 2022, Brex announced plans to eliminate support for companies that did not have “professional funding,” abandoning some small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs) the FinTech giant was initially launched to serve.
“One of the reasons we made that pivot was so we could focus on companies that were growing with us; that are looking to scale. We’re always focusing on our startup, midmarket, and enterprise audience,” Brex’s director of external communications, Danielle Bereznak, told BetaKit. “These features needed to be built for those customer segments, the only way we could dedicate those resources to them was to make that pivot away from SMBs.”
Brex launched its first corporate credit card tailored to startups in 2018 after its Series B round, which was backed by Y Combinator and PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. In 2020, Brex opened its first international office in Vancouver hoping to take advantage of the city’s “deep pool” of local talent.
The Information reported earlier this month that Brex is targeting a 2025 initial public offering, but is first looking to achieve profitability. Per The Information’s report, the company’s revenue has slowed since it received a growth spurt after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, with its most recent earnings showing a quarterly revenue growth of only one percent, from an annualized net revenue of $279 million in Q2 2023 to $283 million in Q3 2023. Brex’s annualized revenue was just under $200 million in the same quarters last year.
Feature image courtesy Brex via its website.