Payhawk Benefits From ERP Focus
Payhawk
The European card wedge is no longer enough to win on its own. In the early phase, providers could grow fast by handing out cards, subsidizing rewards, and replacing manual expense reports at smaller companies. Now the harder work is selling software that finance teams actually wire into ERP, HR, approvals, and multi entity controls, which favors vendors like Payhawk that are built for more complex workflows and makes simple card substitution less durable.
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Pleo is the clearest sign of the reset. Its implied valuation fell from $4.7B in 2021 to about $1.7B by mid 2026, and it went through three layoff rounds after the boom years. That is what a market looks like after easy customer acquisition fades and growth must come from deeper product expansion.
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The reason is economic. In expense management, card rewards and cashback are easy to copy, and the card itself is easy to replace. What gets sticky is the approval logic, accounting sync, entity structure, and payment workflow that sit before and after the transaction. Once those rules are embedded, displacement gets expensive.
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That is where the European field has split. Spendesk still leans into broad self serve spend coverage with unlimited users and cards plus AP and travel. Moss has built a fuller continental stack around invoices, procurement, and supplier payments in 70+ currencies. Payhawk is pushing furthest into enterprise workflows with native SAP S/4HANA and broader ERP connectivity.
From here, growth in Europe will come less from signing another startup onto cards, and more from becoming the control layer for larger multi entity businesses. The winners will look more like finance infrastructure than card programs, with more revenue tied to software, payments orchestration, and ERP embedded workflows than to the original plastic in an employee wallet.