Blogs and best practices from the world of Fintech

In the late 19th and at the start of the 20th-century, merchants introduced charge coins, medallions, and charge-plates for their regular customers. These new ways of paying reduced handwriting mistakes and made record keeping and accounting easier.

Payhawk, the payments and expense solution with offices in London, Sofia, Berlin and Barcelona, has raised $112 million just 3 years after its inception, valuing the company at $570m. The Series B round is led by the San Francisco-based investor Greenoaks, who has a strong track record of investing in high-growth technology companies such as Gorillas, Robinhood, Stripe, Checkout.com and Brex. All existing investors, including QED Investors, Earlybird Digital East and Eleven Ventures are participating in the round.

You can’t help but have seen some of the news from the recent UN Climate Conference of the Parties (COP 26). It had been two years since ministers last met, and they were under more pressure than ever to reach an agreement on multiple objectives. On Friday 12th November, the global event closed for the last time in 2021, but before we dive into the main takeaways, what exactly is a COP?

Payhawk expense management software and company cards was a small but growing idea back in 2018 when we first attended Web Summit. A lot has changed since then. “To look at our business then, compared to where we are now, is a different story,” Andrey Bankovski, commercial director for Payhawk in Bulgaria, explained.

A CFO walks into an office. What do they see? A virtual tangle of finance management systems? Expense management here, bookkeeping there? With a requirement for each tool to ‘bolt’ onto the business’s central accounting system, whether Xero, Sage, Quickbooks, or otherwise. 

As the year draws to an end, we’ve been reflecting on the waves we’ve made in the expense management market over the last 12 months. We’ve also been thinking about some of the other exciting and relevant fintech trends and what impact they’ve had. Here are our top 5. And if you’re new to the sector, check out this glossary first.

The SaaS industry is booming. These days there are financial SaaS tools to support in every aspect of business and spend management from payments to expenses.

Virtual cards are becoming a crucial payment method especially for online transactions, but what are all the benefits of virtual cards for your business?

It’s funny to think about how going cashless actually makes you better off. But that doesn’t make it any less accurate. The efficiencies encouraged by cashless payments are massive, from physical and virtual company cards to expense management software and digital wallets. By going cashless, your business could better manage finances, have easier forecasting, and decrease the risk of human error. And here’s where Payhawk comes in.