Budgets as the Control Layer
Andy Su, co-founder of Pry, on how fintechs choose the right BaaS partners
This reveals Pry was trying to turn FP&A from a planning tool into the control layer for company spending. Instead of building a budget in one system and swiping a corporate card in another, Pry wanted the budget itself to decide what could be spent, by whom, and against which department plan. That is a much deeper workflow than standard expense software, which mostly starts after the purchase and focuses on receipts, approvals, and accounting sync.
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Pry started as startup FP&A for cash runway and fundraising, built on top of QuickBooks and Xero, not as a bookkeeping replacement. That made budgeting its native product surface, so adding card controls was a way to extend forward from planning into execution, not backward from receipts into planning.
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Most expense platforms in the startup stack, especially Ramp and Brex, won adoption through corporate cards and expense automation. Their strength was tagging spend, collecting receipts, and reconciling transactions. Pry was aiming at the missing step before that, where finance teams decide the spend limit by team, vendor, or hiring plan.
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That product direction also changed the business model. Pry was subscription software at the time, but card issuing could add interchange revenue, which is why embedded finance mattered. If Pry could connect forecast data with card data, it could monetize both the software seat and the payment flow moving through the budget.
The category has kept moving toward bundled finance workflows, which is why FP&A and spend are converging. The winners are likely to be the products that make the budget the system of action, not just a spreadsheet or monthly report, and then plug payments, approvals, and forecasting into that same operating loop.