From cross-border payments to employee expense management, fintech solutions are finding more and more use cases every day. And with new blockchain technologies integrating with business processes, companies of all sizes now stand to streamline operations and offer superior customer service.
On the Converge podcast, we were recently joined by Erica Dorfman, Head of Financial Products for Brex, an artificial intelligence-powered spend management platform that assists businesses of all sizes with expensing, bill paying, and financial modeling.
“Building new capabilities is really important for us,” Dorfman says. “The objective is for our customers to become really large companies, and we want them to stay on our platform throughout that life cycle.”
Giving power back to finance teams
Dorfman lays out several eye-opening scenarios where organizations can use fintech to optimize budgets across numerous verticals. She says these functionalities offer the most benefit to small businesses, which comprise the majority of the US economy and are often led by overextended entrepreneurs.
“If you are a 10-person company, you might be the CEO and the entire finance team. You don’t have someone else to go and do that for you,” Dorfman says. “You don’t want to go spend an hour of your time digging through numbers.”
The trick, she describes, is to automate as many of the financial processes as possible. This will satisfy orders, expenses and payments faster and with fewer errors. As a result, companies can spend more time focusing on serving customers and building the business.
“It’s incredibly valuable to the organization because you have really smart people who are sitting there with (paper) receipts — and that’s not a good use of anyone’s time,” Dorfman notes.
Platforms that go beyond payments
By embedding fintech platforms like Brex into different systems, small businesses can gain insights that not only save time through automation but guide key decision-making that contributes to growth strategies.
As an example, Dorfman looks at a small business’s marketing department and its use of digital advertising.
“I can optimize my Google Ads spend … translate those optimizations to other ad platforms and all of your marketing spend, linking it across teams and markets, gaining insights from all of that spend,” Dorfman says. “All of that insight gives you the opportunity to run your business more efficiently.”
The more a company grows, the more money there is to move around — in turn bringing greater complexities within each data exchange. Attaching memos to payment requests or reporting disclosures to tax records can be invaluable for a small business as it scales because it soothes all those growing pains.
Want more insights on the topics shaping the future of cross-border payments? Tune in to Converge, with new episodes every Wednesday.
*The information shared on this blog is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Please note that the opinions expressed on Converge are solely the opinions of the host and the guests, not Convera’s.
