Brex Embedded global card strategy
Art Levy, Chief Business Officer at Brex, on the strategy of Brex Embedded
The strategic point is that card infrastructure only matters when it changes what an employee in another country can actually do with the card. For a multinational buyer, local issuing and local billing mean fewer declined transactions, fewer FX charges, and one spend program that can cover employees across dozens of countries instead of stitching together separate local providers. That makes Brex more comparable to Citi or HSBC for global card coverage than to a domestic only spend tool.
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Brex positions its edge in enterprise around issuing local cards in more than 50 countries, billing in over 50 currencies, and card acceptance in 120 countries. In practice, that lets a company give an employee in Malaysia or Romania a locally usable corporate card while keeping the same controls, limits, and reporting inside one system.
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This is why Brex is embedding into Navan and Coupa instead of trying to replace them. In travel and procurement, enterprises want the card to reconcile cleanly inside the workflow they already use. Brex says those integrations are already processing nearly $1B in annualized payments volume, and later became a meaningful part of its re-accelerating enterprise go to market.
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The clearest comparable is Airwallex, which also wins by combining cards with cross border money movement. Airwallex now gets 50% of gross profit from card and payments products that let global companies issue local cards and handle reimbursements across markets. Ramp, by contrast, has won by bundling more domestic finance workflows together, from bill pay to travel to treasury.
Going forward, enterprise card competition should split in two. Domestic finance suites will keep winning on breadth, while global issuers will win on coverage and local functionality. As more U.S. companies hire, travel, and buy across borders, the company that can make one card program work like a local card almost everywhere should keep taking the highest value multinational accounts.