Brex Empower Competes with Concur
Art Levy, Chief Business Officer at Brex, on the strategy of Brex Embedded
Brex Empower marks Brex’s move from selling a better corporate card to selling the control layer for how large companies spend money. In practice, that means finance teams use Brex to set approval rules, issue physical and virtual cards, route bill payments, manage reimbursements, and sync every transaction into systems like ERP and accounting software, which is the core job Concur and adjacent procurement tools have owned in the enterprise.
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The competitive shift is from interchange to software. Brex’s early growth came from free cards and card spend, but Empower gave it a higher margin SaaS product that could expand into bill pay, reimbursements, and travel, and justify an upmarket push against SAP Concur, Coupa, and similar enterprise finance systems.
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What enterprise buyers actually need is policy control before money moves. The workflow is request, approve, pay, and reconcile. That means deciding who can buy what, from which vendor, under which budget, with which approvals, then pushing the final record into NetSuite or another ERP. That is why spend management becomes stickier than the card itself.
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Brex is not alone in this lane. Ramp, Airbase, Teampay, and Navan all converged on the same idea, bundle cards with software that finance teams open every week. The reason Concur is the benchmark is that it already sits inside big company expense and travel workflows, so replacing it means winning a daily finance workflow, not just offering better rewards on a card.
Going forward, the winners in spend management will look less like card issuers and more like finance operating systems. The more Brex can make Empower the place where employees request spend and controllers close the books, the more it can pull customers away from single purpose tools and capture durable software revenue on top of payments.