Swap launches Corpway, a new corporate expense segment. With Corpway, the Brazilian fintech startup enables corporate expense companies to have built-in financial services for a complete management of their customers, a market that handles about BRL 650 billion per year.
Food, lodging, fuel supplies, tolls, air and bus tickets. These are just some of the corporate expenses that companies must manage on a daily basis with extreme care to keep their activities compliant, agile, and fraud-free.
The corporate expenses market handles BRL 650 billion in Brazil alone every year. A heavy amount, such as companies’ burden of duly addressing and controling all these purchases and refunds. And while some solutions and technologies are there to make entrepreneurs’ and managers’ lives easier, such as corporate cards, they are often limited to offering a means of payment only.
This is because banks issuing cards and credit cards for companies do not offer the usage rule customization, do not provide transaction data, and, above all, do not deliver any type of reconciliation or management software for these corporate expenses.
Under this context, of a market underserved by legacy banking solutions, several innovation companies have emerged in recent years. Building a corporate expense management platform poses a number of challenges for these companies, starting with the management software and evolving to the need to verticalize the means of payment into the platform itself and provide credit for their clients to manage their working capital and continue to grow.
It is only natural that some of these many challenges become market pain points, either due to the lack of partners to build the solutions or the delay of the market and regulations in keeping up with technological evolution.
To address such market pain points and keep up with companies that are challenging and changing paradigms, Swap launches Corpway, a full business front geared towards delivering white-label financial and technology solutions to businesss willing to offer a simple and accurate experience to their clients concerning expense management and corporate spending.
Corpway offers a number of benefits, such as: prepaid credit cards as expense centralizers, access to data for expense reconciliation, detailed transactional data for refund automation, and flexibility in managing and controlling programs, such as balances, limits, anti-fraud, among other features.
A solution built from real cases
Corpway was built by Swap based on the pain points of its own customers in the industry. Through a market screening, Swap identified the following demands: those related to corporate travel, those focused on expense management, and those aimed at offering corporate credit cards for this purpose.
The need for expense management verticalization was a pain point identified for the market, since payments were executed by large banks that would not pass on detailed transaction information.
“On one hand, companies already had great technologies and software to manage these expenses; on the other hand, they did not receive the necessary data from the banks to make a detailed reconciliation. That’s when we realized the opportunity to develop a payment solution to verticalize management”, Marcelo Schucman, Swap’s New Business director, explains.
Having the financial service embedded (which is known as “Embedded Finance“) enables corporate expense companies to manage their clients end-to-end, benefiting from technology and automation – as in other stages of corporate expense management – and is now applied in a complete manner and can be tailored for each client.
Once the verticalization process is in place, it is time to kick off expense control. “The end client needs to know how, when, and where expenses originate. This is enabled by Swap’s technology by providing clients with data for an accurate management. In addition, Usage rules can be customized and limits can be made more flexible according to the needs of each client and each user (employee)”, Schucman explains.
Through verticalization and control, companies can also promote a new revenue line, since all transactions on Swap’s platform generate profitability, which is passed on to our clients in a revenue share model.
“Our mission is to enable these companies to build a framework of solutions that best serves their business. Swap’s is distinguished for specifically targeting this segment. Features were and are developed based on actual cases, on the specific needs of our clients, to address the market’s pain points. We want to pave the way for our clients”, the director adds.
Swap’s proposition with Corpway is to provide corporate expense companies a financial services path for them to develop a complete solution for their end clients.
One of the solutions these companies are able to deliver through Swap’s financial technology is the possibility to have several products inside a single Mastercard, with a balance for trips, meals with clients, office supplies, and whatever else is needed, accepted in more than 2 million network-accredited establishments.
Learn about Corpway’s key benefits
The client is in control
One of the advantages is that cards’ usage rules can be customized at the user level, that is, each employee can have different cards for different uses, with limits defined according to the period of the financial transaction – both for the amount and the number of transactions allowed – as well as rules for blocking transactions and rules on demand, tailored for the client’s business.
Custom accounts
Additionally, prepaid cards can be set up with multiple spending budgets, arranged into different pre-established categories, such as lodging, travel, meals etc. This allows controling and sorting different types of expenses, and the company will have detailed access to transaction data through an account management API.
Tailor-made protection
Corpway also has an anti-fraud system to meet the specific characteristics of each area. Swap’s feature allows each client to outline fraud rules for specific user groups, which enables to enhance transaction approval rates without increasing the risk of its clients’ operations.
Emergency cards
Corpway allows to create a single-use virtual card to simply and quickly solve a specific or emergency demand, such as in cases where an employee misses a flight and needs to buy a new ticket.
Smart cards
The end client can make contacless payments without a physical card, using the main digital wallets – Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. On-site purchases can be made with smartphones and watches, as well other gadgets equipped with NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, and for virtual purchases, the card number is replaced by an alternative number – or token. In addition to making the procedure much more secure, users promptly receive their virtual card and can start using it right away.
Corporate expenses, a BRL 650 billion market in Brazil
The corporate expenses sector has well-established players in more mature markets, such as the USA and Europe, and has been gaining a lot of space, in number of investments and deals, in Brazil and Latin America as a whole.
Last year alone, the market raised over USD 46 billion in investments worldwide. Over the same period, the Latin American market attracted about USD 8 billion in investments. For an even more accurate picture, the Travel&Mobility market alone grew over 800% in investments between 2019 and 2020.
Swap launches Corpway, a corporate expense segment to revolutionize this market. Click here and learn more.
