Payhawk launches NextGen company cards with built-in spend rules

We started Payhawk in 2018 with the humble idea to bring new products to the world of payments that transformed the way businesses manage their spending. Our bet as a strong product team was to deliver cutting edge technology that gave new skills and unparalleled efficiency to finance teams.

But there is a reason why there aren’t many new innovations in the fintech world every day. It’s a fragmented market with a lot of legacy systems, old school vendors, and high entry barriers for startups. We succeeded in bringing customers from over 18 countries to use Payhawk and manage their spending in a completely different way, but there was one innovation that always held us back to really step up the game - the card.

After more than 2 years of iterations, investment rounds, partnerships, 3 different card processors, I am happy to announce that we finally managed to crack it. The Payhawk system is now able to fully process every card payment in real-time and apply built-in spend rules and business logic during your card authorization. This opens up a new world of possibilities for us. Soon our customers will be able to set allowed spend-categories, merchants, locations, days, and times when your card works. And use team cards that come with a shared budget and a name (SaaS purchases, Sales tools, Marketing spend, etc.) while every team member receives a personal card linked to the team card.

Every time you swipe your Payhawk card at a POS terminal or pay online, Payhawk will be able to run millions of business rules and decide whether to authorize your card. It’s like IFTTT for card payments. Check all the superpowers of our NextGen card here, and read about our press release below.

From the press release

London, Monday, November 9

Payhawk, the only end to end financial system that combines credit cards, payments, expenses, cash management and pre-accounting automation into one integrated experience, today announced the launch of a NextGen company card.

The new cards empower finance teams to implement spend rules directly on company cards based on locations, budgets, merchants, spend categories or days and times when cards can be used. The increased granular-level control on cards enables finance leaders to run a fully digital spend policy enforced on every payment in real-time. The NextGen cards recognize unauthorized spend on every swipe and prohibit usage that doesn’t comply with the company spend policy.

“The inability to control company cards and easily collect outstanding receipts are the main reasons why finance leaders prefer employees to spend personal funds and then wait for reimbursements. On the other hand, according to our recent survey in Germany, 55.1% of employees would prefer to have access to a company card instead of spending personal funds. We take the pressure off by providing cards with built-in spend rules, and we fully automated the collection of outstanding receipts from the company cards.” said Hristo Borisov, Co-founder and CEO of Payhawk. “Finance teams will also benefit from our AI-assisted data extraction algorithms that read receipts and invoices in more than 60 languages to simplify the manual data entry for pre-accounting purposes.” continues Borisov.

The NextGen corporate cards also bring the novel concept of team cards. Instead of sharing a company credit card around the office, risking security and making the process of collecting outstanding receipts impossible, finance teams can now issue team cards. Each team card comes with a shared budget and a name (SaaS purchases, Sales tools, Marketing spend etc.) while every team member receives a personal card linked to the team card. This way, employees have the autonomy to make payments, but are also held accountable for every payment and receipt out of the team budget. All spend rules and policies can be configured on team cards too.

Payhawk is one of the most recent innovators part of the Visa Fast Track program where global companies speed up the process of deploying innovative solutions to the market. The new cards will start shipping in December.

About Payhawk

Payhawk is the financial system of tomorrow that combines credit cards, payments, expenses, cash management and pre-accounting automation into one integrated experience. Payhawk was founded in 2018 and currently serves customers across 18 countries in Europe from its offices in London, Berlin, Barcelona and Sofia. Payhawk disrupts the expense management market by combining financial and software products into a single platform. For more information visit payhawk.com