Brex Focuses on Card Depth
Art Levy, Chief Business Officer at Brex, on the strategy of Brex Embedded
Brex is choosing depth over breadth in enterprise, which makes its card more useful inside the finance tools large companies already run. Instead of asking a global company to replace travel, procurement, and spend systems all at once, Brex lands with card and expense management, then plugs into Navan and Coupa where travel managers and procurement teams already work. That fits how enterprise buying actually happens, by function, not as one giant suite sale.
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Brex Embedded turns the card into a distribution wedge. A company can start by using Brex only inside Navan for travel or inside Coupa for procurement, then expand into broader spend management once finance teams trust the workflow and reconciliation.
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Ramp has gone the other direction. It has kept adding bill pay, procurement, travel, treasury, and SaaS attach, which helped it pass Brex on payments volume in 2023 and reach an estimated $1B annualized revenue by August 2025. That is a wider bundle, not a narrower specialist pitch.
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This split reflects a real enterprise truth. At larger companies, the pain is less about getting a card into an employee's wallet and more about making requests, approvals, policy checks, and reconciliation fit existing systems. That is why integrations and workflow matter as much as rewards or interchange.
Going forward, the winner upmarket is likely the company that becomes the default layer for a specific finance workflow, then expands from there. Brex is aiming to own global card and expense management inside enterprise point solutions, while Ramp is trying to own more of the full finance stack. Those are increasingly distinct end states.