Spendesk - Business spending can be beautifully easy.

Thank you @tiboel for hunting us ! After two months in private beta, Spendesk has already totaled more than €1,000,000 worth of funds, loaded to the application by 50 pilot companies all over Europe. We wanted CFOs and accountants to be able to easily generate and manage virtual and physical credit cards for employees to use in their day-to-day transactions. Now with Spendesk, finance teams stay in control and employees get their job done! Only available in Europe 🇪🇺 Questions and feedback are welcome!

@rodardant @tiboel Really interesting. Like a centralized privacy.com. Very promising !

@jpvalery Thanks ;-) !

@mdausinger Yeah, that is exactly the pain we are addressing 😁.

Thank you @bertrandbesse and Tinyclues for being one of our first happy customers !

Thank you @leguillons ! Very happy to have you with us since the early days !

@almackin Thanks. For the moment export is CSV only. But we are working on accounting tools integration :).

@curiousigor Thanks ! The cards are Mastercards :)

@rodardant cool. Thanks for the info 🙃

@danr_4 Thank you ! Big players offer some solutions (like Amex) that target bigcorp, and also traditional banks also but they are not product guys :). In Europe when you need to order a new corporate card you get 8 weeks delay to receive your cards with a lot of paperworks to fill. And we should keep in mind that B2B payments behaviors changed a lot this last 10 years: people in companies more and more buy as they do in their personal life. And the tool for business spending - the credit card - did not evolve...

@rodardant That's it? Only BigCo's? not a single startup that does more or less the same?

@danr_4 we have seen some startups launch in the past 6 months in the US with a similar value proposition and I know others entrepreneur working on projects in the same area.

@clementdelangue Thanks ;).

@ourielohayon Yeah B2C have all the good product, now it's time for B2B ;-). Joke ahead I find Privacy awesome to manage online personal subscriptions (only in the US though :(). With Spendesk corporate can do the same, along with all their card purchases.

Hi @abetancort. You make a very good point: cards issuers are making money taking a cut on transactions, and this cut is transparent for the customer as merchants are paying it. For Big Corp, issuers also share this cut providing cashback to their customers. You may be aware that this BM will be difficult to be sustainable (at least in Europe) as interchange fees are getting regulated. But the point here is where stands the value of Spendesk. It's clear for us that the value do not lies in the cards but in the software and the intelligence we build on top of the cards to help companies solve an operational pain. On a pragmatic approach, the cost of operational pain you get for using your corporate cards (even if you get money from them) should be considered. And I believe that this cost is always largely underestimated.

@rodardant that it's way I mentioned that cash back are given to companies mostly but not only to enterprises that do a lot of travel outside the Euro Zone, as you know when you pay in another currency either the buyer (not in wise Enterprises) or the seller get punished around a 3% commission for exchange rate fees over and above the daily settlement bid/ask prices. But even as merchant and interbank commission maybe thin, the issuer receives the most of what is left and depending on their share of each market they can command a higher share of these commission. The EU is regulating what are the maximum commissions a merchant (seller) will bear on the grounds of Consumers Protection, but it does not enter on how these are splited by the merchant bank and the issuer of the card as that would be considered against free competition by the own EU. Today is a business of volume as marginal cost are negligible. For Big Corps. issuing cards to employees is not perceived as problem, they automatically settle the unjustified balance against that person salary at the end of the 2 month justification period or in case of termination all outstanding balances are settled immediately until properly justified by the employee. This common practice, the risk lies on the card holder and not the Corp. as the employee has the whole responsibility of obtaining proper authorization for all expenses (limits for the cards already take into consideration monthly salary and possible severance pay). Your solution may be better but it's trying to solve a problem that corporations have already solved without a recurring cost... I'm afraid you'll find it very difficult to introduce it in the segment that have the most corporate cards issued and whose expenditure with them is the high per card and as a whole.

@abetancort thanks for all these details. For the moment we target SMB and we will figure out soon how to proper address Bigcorp in term of pricing and product.