Brex shift from cards to SaaS

Brex’s move into SaaS was the shift from being a card that companies use, to being the system finance teams run every day. Cards create revenue when spend happens, but software creates daily habits around approvals, reimbursements, bill pay, travel, and accounting. That matters because once a company routes those workflows through Brex, switching is no longer as simple as replacing a piece of plastic.

• The product bundle was concrete, not abstract. Brex packaged reimbursements, bill pay, accounting integrations, and travel booking into Essentials and a $12 per user per month Premium tier, with approval chains, live budgets, compliance checks, and travel controls aimed at finance operators rather than just cardholders.
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• This was largely a response to how the category changed after Ramp. Competitors proved that controlling the spend workflow, request, approve, pay, reconcile, creates stickier software and higher margin recurring revenue than relying mostly on interchange from card swipes.
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• The revenue mix shows why Brex needed this. By late 2023, Brex still looked mostly like a payments and banking business, with about 61% of revenue from interchange, 33% from deposits, and only 6% from SaaS. The software layer was strategically important even before it was financially large.
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From here, the winners in corporate spend will be the companies that turn finance work into one connected workflow, then use AI to automate more of it. Brex’s SaaS layer set up that next phase, where growth comes less from card volume alone and more from owning approvals, accounting, vendor payments, travel, and the data exhaust across all of them.