Payhawk partners with Visa to issue business cards with 0.50% exchange rates

London and Sofia, June15, 2020 - Payhawk announces a partnership with Visa and the German payment provider Wirecard to offer Visa debit cards to companies in 13 European countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Bulgaria. Payhawk’s customers across Europe can now use virtual and physical Visa card which can then be used to pay anywhere Visa is accepted, in-store and online, as well as for cash withdrawals at ATMs.

Since 2018, Payhawk has been helping businesses organize company spend by combining financial services and expense management tools. The cooperation with Visa enables the Bulgarian start-up to address the complexity of managing company cards and dealing with expenses that small and medium-sized businesses across Europe face. With Payhawk, CFOs, finance teams and accounting departments are able to manage up to ten company Visa cards per employee without the need to do reconciliation or “chase” receipts. Flexible budgets and spend policies enable heavy spenders and marketers to use business Visa cards for different payments, projects or clients. Each business card can be individually controlled by monthly budgets, spend limits or being part of a more complex request and approval workflow. Flexible top-up approval workflow based on projects, cost centers or teams guarantees compliance and control with company spend practices. Company administrators in the Payhawk system monitor the budgets in real time and have full transparency over all company Visa cards in use, all the time.

The Payhawk Visa card is available to all Payhawk business customers from May 2020. It comes with a 2 euro worldwide ATM withdrawal rate and offers optimised exchange rates of 0.50%. This makes the Payhawk Visa cards particularly cost-effective when spending abroad or purchasing online in multiple currencies. Payhawk also complies with local tax regulations in the UK, Germany and Spain, eliminating the need for companies in these markets to store paper copies of their receipts and invoices.

“To build our product, we have been working closely with Visa since 2019. As the world’s leader in digital payments, Visa was the ideal strategic partner for us to expand our business model across Europe. The close collaboration gave us quite early on the opportunity to learn from the market while developing our core product. The constant feedback we got from finance leaders in SMEs is how much time they waste reconciling card statements, tracking expenses, handling paper, manually entering data and trying to enforce spend policies and budgets. We are happy to provide an efficient and compliant solution to manage company spend end-to-end and enforce spend policies and budgets directly on cards. Visa teams in London helped us roll out our business model in 13 European countries. In early 2020, we accepted Visa's invitation to open our German office in Berlin’s coworking space Spielfeld, where we could further develop our product while being close to Visa's SME innovation team” said Hristo Borisov, Co-founder and CEO of Payhawk.

"Visa is committed to supporting FinTechs advance their potential and get to market quickly, so they are ready to provide innovations that move the world forward everyday - especially in current times. Payhawk participated in the Visa Innovation Program in 2019, which supports young Fintech start-ups and their ideas on how to transform payments, and within a year they have taken their business model to the next level. We are proud to have been part of their journey.” Says Jana Lvova, Head of Fintech Delivery, Visa.