Brex Interchange to SaaS Transition
Why Brex sold to Capital One
Brex’s ceiling depended on proving it was more than a card business. Interchange is fast to scale because every swipe throws off revenue, but it carries lower margins, weaker lock in, and more cyclical valuation than software. To earn a higher multiple, Brex had to turn the card into the entry point for products finance teams use every week, like spend controls, bill pay, travel, procurement workflows, and AI powered finance tools, so revenue would come from sticky workflow ownership, not just payment volume.
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Brex itself said interchange was still the majority of revenue in late 2024, even as software, interest, FX, and other fees were growing faster as a share. That is the core transition, moving from getting paid mainly when customers spend, to getting paid for the system they run finance on.
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Ramp shows why investors reward this shift. By August 2025, Ramp had reached $1B in annualized revenue and was monetizing not just cards, but bill pay, procurement, travel, treasury, and a $15 per user per month software tier, supporting a much richer revenue mix and enterprise story.
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Brex’s response was to go upmarket and embed its card inside tools like Navan, Coupa, and Sabre. In practice, that means a travel or procurement manager can issue a Brex virtual card inside the software they already use, with automatic reconciliation, then expand into broader Brex products later.
The next phase was about turning distribution and infrastructure into a real enterprise platform. If Brex could keep landing through cards while owning more of the finance team’s daily workflow, AI automation, and global money movement, it could start to look less like a payments company and more like a durable software network with materially higher multiples.