Q&A of the Week: Brex Cash
A brief Q&A with Brex’s Zach Abrams. Subscribe to Fintech Today here.
How did the idea originate — was it something that kept popping up from users, or is this something that you all felt was a natural extension of your main product?
We’re providing financial services that help businesses manage and deploy their capital. Our aim is to become the financial operating system for every growing business. The first product we’ve launched is our corporate card, which has been quite successful. But our founders have known our card was just one of the many financial products entrepreneurs needas they grow their business.
So, from the beginning, we knew Cash was a core financial service we needed to provide. Over the last ~2 years, we’ve heard this belief validated over and over and over again as we gained customers, learned more about their financial stack (and it’s limitations), and began asking businesses how we could better support their growth.
Fast growing startups have a hard time prioritizing what to do next — how did Brex prioritize this versus other potential products?
There was both internal and external motivation. On the internal side, we’ve hit a pretty good cadence of shipping one big, new service every ~6 months. First we launched the corporate card, then our ecommerce product, and now Cash. Brex has launched 3 unique financial services in 18 months (most of which I had little to do with — so all credit goes to the founders and existing team!).
Externally, we see a fundamental shift happening. This is most readily apparent in the consumer space — individuals are moving from existing, established financial institutions towards newer fintech companies that provide more customer-aligned services. Consumer shifts are generally a leading indicator of b2b trends. So, we felt very strongly that there was pent up demand in the business space, and we needed to get to market asap. We’ve subsequently seen this hypothesis validated by the initial demand for Cash and receptivity since launch.
What value does Brex Cash provide versus other options in the space?
We think we’ve built the best cash account for growing businesses — best experience, highest yield, no fees, and rewards on every payment. We allow businesses to manage their core financial services (including card, bill, ACH and wire payments) with one log-in + dashboard. And our products are getting better every day as we make improvements and add complementary services.
Do you think managing cash is a problem that’s widespread among businesses or specifically for Brex customers (from what I understand tend to be startups and tech companies right now).
It’s widespread. Very few businesses love their banking experience. Today our Cash product is focused on meeting the needs of growing tech companies, but we strongly believe every business would (and will!) benefit from Cash.
