These FinTechs grew from startups to major players in the industry, raising hundreds-of-millions of dollars at sky-high valuations. In this blog, we’ll walk through their growth, explore their key product offerings, and look at what the future holds for this space. Check back later this month to see our blog about what is happening with the traditional large banks in the small business card industry!

Rocketing Growth:

Many business-focused FinTechs, darlings of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, started off by offering corporate credit cards for startups. These FinTechs then expanded to target Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and even larger corporations with new corporate card offerings, no-fee banking products, and expense management platforms. Similar to their consumer counterparts, most business-focused FinTechs offer slick user interfaces and seamless digital integration that set them apart from traditional financial institutions and could provide outsized value to their clients.

According to Comscore’s custom digital behavior data, desktop and mobile browser visits to top business-focused FinTechs¹ increased by 35% year-over-year, reaching over 25M visits in Q1 2024. The growth accelerated further in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse in March 2023. This unexpected collapse spooked traditional bank customers, many FinTechs took advantage of this pivot point and adjusted their marketing and promotions. Highlighting partner bank account sweep functions with high FDIC coverages and offered support to help ex-SVB customers to open new accounts. Both Brex and Mercury reportedly gaining thousands of customers following the SVB collapse.

Diversifying Product Offerings:

While all major business-focused FinTechs offer a spending card program (through either debit or credit cards), 70% of these FinTechs offer a business credit card program to their customers. These credit card programs almost universally provide similar features that set them apart from traditional banks, such as unlimited employee cards at no additional cost and the ability to create virtual card numbers to streamline the expense and bill pay processes. Some of these features are rare and cutting edge among traditional players but are table stakes in the FinTech offerings.

More recently, business-focused FinTechs shifted to position themselves as the next generation financial operating systems that power businesses. Thus, many delved further into the expense management arena, promising corporate finance teams that they had the ability to assist them with closing their books earlier and reigning in expenses. All top business-focused FinTechs¹ offer spending insights functions to their customers. This is also an area where we see additional product development with the rollout of AI-based features.

Where Is The Industry Headed:

Within the past year, more FinTechs have begun offering features powered by artificial intelligence. Today, 60% of the top business-focused FinTechs¹ offer customers AI-powered features. AI is primarily deployed into two market segments. The primary segment involves automating the bill pay process, including filing cardholders’ expense reports and automating invoicing and payments. Instead of manual inputs from cardholders, AI-powered features automatically file expense reports based on receipt photos submitted by the cardholders (some can even process partial images), greatly reducing the hours spent filing expense reports. Additionally, more FinTechs have started rolling out Generative AI chat functions that can help finance executives and employees with everyday tasks. We will highlight a few innovators in the space below.

Financial Insights Powered by Gen-AI

• Brex Finance Assistant: Announced in March 2023 as part of the Brex AI offering, this product provides CFOs and finance leaders with the ability to review company financial information in chat format through either text or voice.

Source: Brex

• Ava from Navan: Launched in May 2023, this product helps customers to analyze expenses and suggests ways for companies to save money.

Source: Navan

• Ramp Intelligence: Launched in May 2023, this product provides customers with finance insights, offers vendor insights (like comparing subscription costs), and helps customers to save money on expenses.

Source: Ramp

Travel Booking Powered by Gen-AI

Travel is another area where we expect to see increased investments from business-focused FinTechs that will streamline corporate travel booking (similar to what we predicted in the consumer space in our previous blog).

• Brex Assistant: Launched September 2023, this product helps employees look for flights within the company’s expense policy and cardholder’s preferences to ease the flight booking process.

Source: Brex

• Hotel Concierge by Ava (from Navan): Launched in September 2023, this product helps cardholders make personalized hotel bookings through chat based on cardholder preferences and company policies.

Key Takeaways:

Business-focused FinTechs have rapidly evolved from startups to industry leaders, offering innovative solutions that cater to market demands. FinTechs in this category will continue to challenge traditional financial institutions, while driving innovation that will help set new standards for efficiency and user experience. As they continue to integrate advanced technologies like Gen-AI, we expect business-focused FinTechs to provide more personalized features and actionable insights for business leaders and employees alike. Ultimately, we expect these FinTechs to provide innovations that streamline financial operations in a manner that will benefit businesses of all sizes.

Reach out here to discover how the latest Business-focused FinTech innovations are revolutionizing business finance and where your company stands!