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Many of us have used virtual credit or debit cards and haven’t given them a second thought. In today’s world of contactless payments, there is no difference between a virtual and physical card. But a virtual card is actually a piece of software and as such it can be programmed to act in very specific ways.
My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Andrew Jamison, the CEO and Co-Founder of Extend, the spend management platform that works with your existing credit card. They use the virtual card concept to extend an existing card with new functionality to manage and control spending for middle-market businesses.
In this podcast:
- How a sabbatical helped form the idea for Extend.
- The history of virtual cards and the two companies that pioneered their use.
- Why Andrew started using virtual cards while at American Express.
- Why we won’t be running out of virtual card numbers any time soon.
- Extend’s core virtual card offering and how it works.
- Why they decided not to offer their own card and use existing cards instead.
- How they go to market with their bank partners.
- The customer experience with Extend’s technology for the end user .
- Some of the use cases for their virtual cards.
- The size of business that is the sweet spot for Extend.
- How they are able to interface with the digital wallets from Apple and Google.
- How they work with the main accounting software platforms.
- How Andrew sees the impact of AI on spend management.
- What is next for Extend.
Read a transcription of our conversation below.
FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 528 – ANDREW JAMISON
Andrew Jamison: Our contrarian view was, actually, is there a way for me to weave this and stitch this together where I could use my existing card? I don’t have to change my bank relationship, right? I can leverage my bank relationship. And so that’s really where we set about pulling together and really weaving core strategic partners of the banks, the networks, the card processors, others like LexisNexis that provide sanctioned screening and said, “Okay, if I can build this and layer this over the top of this core infrastructure, then I can remove friction and deliver this over your credit card,” which meant ultimately that I was enhancing — hence the word ‘extend’ and the name of the company Extend was, I’m extending the usability of your existing product, knowing full well that very few people use even close to a third of the credit limit on the card. So plenty of capacity was there from a lending perspective, but I wanted to overlay capabilities that meant you could now insert into different use cases to run your business more efficiently.
Peter Renton: This is the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the show for fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping Fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with fintech founders and banking executives.
On the show today, I am delighted to welcome Andrew Jamison. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Extend, a leader in the spend management space. Now, Extend’s approach to spend management is fundamentally different to others in the space in that they are not offering their own card. Businesses can actually use their existing card and add in Extend’s tools. This makes it a much easier sell for businesses, and layering in Extend’s virtual card technology brings all the benefits of modern spend management to medium-sized businesses all the way up to enterprises. Now let’s get on with the show.
PR: Welcome to the podcast, Andrew.
AJ: Nice to meet you, Peter. Thanks for having me on this show.
PR: My pleasure. So let’s get started by giving the listeners a little bit of context and background. Maybe you can just hit on some of the highlights of your career to date.
AJ: Absolutely. So look, I started my career working alongside SAP for the first 10 years. And by that, I mean I was a consultant, and I traveled pretty much around the world, really focused on the sort of finance departments. But these projects were typically global in nature. The ERP landscape is that way. And remember, this is of mid 90s, right, all the way to the early 2000s, when it was really a hot topic driven by Y2K, if people remember that.
PR: Right, yes, I do.
AJ: And so that was really, for me, where I learned the underpinnings of finance, the underpinnings of accounting, and all those lovely and interesting things that helped get me to sleep most nights. And then I moved on after an MBA, and I joined American Express in London for the first two and a half years and then transitioned over to the US, the mothership, the ivory towers, whichever way you want to call it. But that’s where the money was. Follow the money, as they always say, especially when you’re in a product role and you need budgets to go and build different things out. So I spent 12 years at Amex. The last five of those, I managed all of Amex’s B2B products and platforms, which is where I first got introduced to the concept of virtual cards. I really took that as a portfolio of about sort of $35, $40 billion up to $75 billion over that five-year period. So it saw tremendous growth, a lot of it driven by sort of the more digital payments rather than the physical card transactions. And then I took a sabbatical for the best part of 15 months due to health issues with my mother and being back in Europe. I spent a little bit time on the sideline and it’s actually a wonderful thing to be able to stop and think, and not sort of be caught up in sort of the daily routines of projects you have to deliver against and different deliverables. And thankfully, my wife was able to keep the fort, but essentially allowed me then to really sort of think about what was the next part of my journey. And the journey took me into being an entrepreneur, which was something I’d promised I would never do having lived with a father who was one, but lo and behold, there I was figuring out that for me, the best way to impact the market was actually to roll up my sleeves and do what I enjoyed most, which is sort of really working alongside colleagues to figure out how we solve for different customer challenges. And that’s really what got me to Extend.
PR: Okay, great. Well, before we get into Extend, I want to dig into virtual cards for a minute. You spent a lot of time at American Express on them, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about the history of virtual cards and how American Express first got involved with them.
AJ: So virtual cards are not new. They’re well over 25 years old. And the concept, you know, for people to understand of a virtual card is that you can actually create a 15 or 16-digit number, depending on what card network you’re on. And effectively it acts in every single way like a credit card, except it only comes in digital nature. So it’s really only for online type of purchases. That was an industry that sort of grew in the late 90s, really late 90s. And you had really two players that emerged in that space. One was GE. And think of GE as a massive conglomerate ordering a lot of different goods and services. There was a point in time when if you didn’t have a purchase order, you couldn’t get paid. How do you reconcile, therefore, the idea that a purchase order would happen and, on the back end, you got paid? Well, they came up with these great ideas. What if I actually created a virtual card to the value of a purchase order so that when the charge came through, I could close a purchase order and create automation, right? In the world of GE, huge efficiency gains. And so, for them, this made a ton of sense in their business. Then you have this other company out in Ireland called Orbiscom, and they had focused more on sort of the travel side of things and specifically linked to hotel bookings. Imagine that you’re going on Orbitz, or Expedia is probably more relevant these days since they merged. And imagine that you’re actually booking with your own credit card as a consumer, a hotel room in San Francisco, right? Let’s say for all intents and purposes, the Westin in San Francisco. And the idea was that at the time, they would charge your credit card for those prepaid rooms. The challenge was then that the aggregator, Expedia, would have to go and pay for the hotel room at the hotel property. So what would happen is you would check out and the hotel property would send a lovely paper invoice over to our friends at Expedia. Expedia would then look at the bill and say, does it match up with Andrew’s booking? And then it went through a dispute process if there was anything that was not tallying up. So contrast that with them now injecting a virtual credit card number into the booking. So it looked, for all intents and purposes, like any other booking with a credit card holding the reservation. And then the card was charged. And if it was the wrong amount, it essentially got fixed on the spot as opposed to, you know, paper and process being brought out, and it took weeks. So they saved hundreds of people in the back office. And effectively allowed them to become a more efficient business again. So efficiency is at the root of virtual credit cards. It’s a way of typically reconciling two distinct parts of a transaction. And it happens pretty seamlessly. And that was really the benefit that people saw in virtual cards.
PR: How did American Express first get into it and what was some of the work you did there?
AJ: So, interesting enough, we started to see a transition in the industry where people have been using the concept of purchasing cards. And purchasing cards was the first evolution into B2B, away from traditional T&E, away from I’m traveling and I have a hotel, and I pay for restaurants and a flight. It was more to do with how do I buy office supplies? How do I buy other things that I need for my business? But sometimes in really big quantities, so I need to have a really big limit, sometimes a million, sometimes $10 million. And you don’t want that card number to be out there in general. So these were pretty prized possessions. But what happened is they got shared across lots of different employees. And so, at the end of the month, we had thousands of charges appearing. And then it was like, well, who spent? What was this for? And how do I reconcile this to anything? And so the process got a little bit out of control. And so Amex started to see that virtual cards were coming onto the scene. And interestingly enough, that was a time when Amex decided to go and buy GE’s card portfolio, right? And with it came this platform that they acquired called V-Payment that allowed them to say, well, we now have virtual card technology as part of our own ecosystem. And so that’s how Amex got that portfolio and then was able to say, great, let’s take that technology, and start offering it out to our largest customers. So very quickly, you started seeing the volume scale, 10x over the course really of a period of four years. And you really start seeing adoption across the mass of Amex’s bigger customers.
PR: So just a quick question before we go on, because it’s something I’ve always wondered. American Express card numbers, 15 digits. You know, there’s tens of millions of cards out there. We don’t have an infinite number of virtual card numbers, right? I mean, are we ever going to run out?
AJ: So that’s been a question that’s been posed many, many, many times. And we always surprise ourselves. You have to remember that there is also the security code associated with the card, right? The CVC number. So, in the case of a traditional card, it’s the three digits on the back. In the case of Amex, it’s the four digits on the front. So there’s actually more numbers to play with than people actually can imagine. And numbers get retired, numbers get recycled over time. So there’s been more capacity in the numbers than people had ever thought was real. So, at the moment, right, there’s no thought that we’d run out of numbers. They’re always finding new ways to sort of think about how they can use the full extent of those ranges.
PR: Right. Okay. So, let’s move on to Extend and you talked about your sabbatical, you had some time to think. What was the aha moment where you thought, okay, this should be a business.
AJ: So it was interesting. I mean, it’s never something I thought about when I was actually at the company. It was more one of those sort of reflections of saying, you know, virtual cards were an interesting concept, one that I actually thought was relevant even to the consumer population, right? I think everyone could imagine, know, a kid going to college, you have a family member on the other coast or overseas, wouldn’t it be great instead of like wiring the money to actually be able to give them access to their own digital card and they spend on it, and you see everything they spend, and you start to be able to control what’s happening. And I thought like, so why have we not gotten there? And I realized it was a case of it took too much resources to stand up a client. So when I mentioned, we grew the portfolio 10X inside of American Express, it was really only with the biggest customers. Because it was a selection process of, I can only afford to roll this out if I think you’re going to be spending north of 15, 20 million dollars on this product. Too many people setting up new contracts, too many people setting up the technology, people on the client side having to commit to resources as well. So just too much friction for it to scale. And so then I coupled that with one of my favorite quotes. One of my bosses at American Express who’s now over at Citi, Pam Codispoti, said every time I came into meetings, I was always talking about fairly complicated B2B type of payments. She’d say, “Andrew, I don’t know what it is, but whenever we have these meetings, you make my hair hurt.” I was like, boy, that’s a powerful statement. Clearly, I was in a different world than she was in from a branding and marketing standpoint, and I was really talking about bits and bytes and data as a whole, and data was always at the core of B2B payments. And it’s funny as I sat there, you know, reflecting on things that there’s got to be a simpler way. And so that’s what, for me, the aha moment was the combination of like great technology, the great reflection of, like, why is this stuff always so complicated to thinking, okay, is there a way for us to sort of bring this whole thing together where I can remove friction from adoption? Because a product in the end of itself is relevant to a huge base. And that’s really what set me off on saying, is this a real proposition or not? And very quickly got to the point where I was like, well, this is doable. And I saw a path towards doing that. And that’s really what set me off and said, OK, let’s build a team. Let’s go raise some money. Let’s bring this product to market.
PR: Right. Right. Okay. So then maybe you could just describe the core offering today and how it works.
AJ: Yes, so we took a bit of a contrarian view. You know, the idea that you could have a credit card and off it, you would be able to spin up any number of digital credit cards, right, which are like child accounts that were digitally native, that essentially all rolled up to your underlying credit limit of your physical card, right? That was something that we saw sort of grow and scale, but really was coming from emerging players. It was Brex on market first, then sort of came Ramp. And there was more leveraging sort of more modern processors, right? And some were the likes of the Marqetas of this world and Lithic and Stripe were all getting into this world of more digital issuance platforms than sort of the big providers that existed until then, which is FIS and Fiserv and TSYS. And so I sort of saw that as saying, okay, that’s all well and good, but how many customers are truly going to go for that net new technology? When many people rely on their banks for other core services. So our contrarian view was actually, is there a way for me to weave this and stitch this together where I could use my existing card? I have to change my bank relationship, right? I can leverage my bank relationship. And so that’s really where we set about pulling together and really weaving core strategic partners of the banks, the networks, the card processors, others like LexisNexis that provide sanctioned screening and said, okay, if I can build this and layer this over the top of this core infrastructure, then I can remove friction and deliver this over your credit card, which meant ultimately that I was enhancing. Hence, the word extend and the name of the company Extend was, I’m extending the usability of your existing product knowing full well that very few people use even close to a third of the credit limit on the card. So plenty of capacity was there from a lending perspective, but I wanted to overlay capabilities that meant you could now insert into different use cases to run your business more efficiently.
PR: So, did you need to make technology for the card issuers, or does this work with any credit card?
AJ: No, so that’s exactly right. We had to work, which is really, when I look back now, the first four five years was really us piping into the core infrastructure. And again, I’m talking like Fortune 500 companies, many of them actually Fortune 100 companies. And yeah, we had to go and get our contracts set up and then sort of make sure we got access to these data feeds. It’s not easy. And so that’s why it’s contrarian. But it’s almost like I chose to scale Everest first, thinking that afterwards I’d have a downhill ride versus going the other way around, which will slowly work our way up and build our own brand. That’s where we took that contrarian view. But yes, we effectively are exactly that. We’re a technology provider, and we sell our technology to the banks so that they can overlay our services on top of their existing cards.
PR: Okay. So it’s really a two-step process. You have a bank, and I see some of the banks, you’ve got some pretty big names here that are on your website, as far as partners go, like American Express, obviously. You got BMO, HSBC, Regions, these are sizable banks. And I see you’ve got MasterCard and Visa on board as well. You’ve obviously got that, but, how do you get business? Do you go to market with the banks? Because this is not really obvious how this works. And it’s not something that you’ve kind of created your own little micro niche within fintech that didn’t really exist before. So how do you go to market?
AJ: That’s exactly right. We sell our services into banks, and then banks go out and sell them to their customers, right? Or cross sell them, effectively our services. Now, in some cases, it is the extended branded application that they’ll go online or into the app store to get the app. And in other cases, and over time, many of them become white-labeled. And I believe the end game is we’ll be embedded right into existing banking applications. But that’s a long roadmap for some of these bank partners that have limited resources in this particular space.
PR: Right. So, for a company that has an American Express card with your technology, how does it work? And what is the small business or the enterprise? How are they kind of reconciling everything? What’s the process?
AJ: Yeah. Again, remember, this is an overlay, right? So ultimately, their statement still comes from their bank partner. They still pay their bank partner, right? In terms of the card numbers that we generate, they come from the bank partner, right? So we leverage a whole ecosystem when a card gets authorized, it goes through the traditional authorization path of the card networks down to the issuers. So we don’t intercept any of the core fundamentals. And that was part of our belief was these banks have built highly scalable businesses, right? With really, really high-quality processes around underwriting, et cetera, et cetera. And so it’s like, I don’t want to interfere with that. So we really, again, overlay with it. And so what does a customer do today? They’ll pull out their existing card account, and they will essentially download our application or go to the white-labeled application. They will key in that 15, 16 digit number. And then in the background will authenticate that they own that card. Essentially, we’ll either put an authorization on that account, and there’ll be a code in that, and they’ll key that in to show that they own the account. Then on the back of doing that, which is really a five-minute process, we can then work with them to say, we can now distribute digital credit cards off the top of that. So, the user can go in and say, I want to create a card, and I’m going to give you one use case, but we can go into a little bit more about what the types of use cases are in B2B. They may want to create a card because they’ve just signed up for a new SaaS subscription. They maybe want to go and use Adobe, and there’s a subscription fee associated with it. So to control the subscription, they’ll create a virtual card and that unique card number, they’ll then lodge against that particular subscription. Now, every month, that card will be charged for the exact amount, and the balance when it’s charged goes back to zero and then it re-ups the next month to the value of the subscription, it gets charged and the cycle goes on that way. So you can control how every account is used. And we see a lot of usage around subscriptions. Why? Because people are desperately trying to control those subscriptions, making sure they’re not getting overcharged for more users than they actually have and getting it right ahead rather than have to go through a credit process on the back end, which can take weeks and months.
PR: That’s interesting. So maybe talk about some of the other use cases that you’re seeing because that’s a pretty obvious one, I think, and something that has a lot of utility for companies trying to control subscription revenue. But maybe talk about some that we haven’t discussed yet. What else do you see?
AJ: So let me give you maybe three different examples, right? We have a lot of digital advertisers, right? Agencies that essentially will run campaigns for many different customers and often many campaigns across a customer. And they agree with those customers roughly the budget they’re gonna go and spend on these campaigns, but they don’t really know which ones are gonna work and which ones are not gonna work. So they’ll go and create different virtual cards which they’ll assign to different campaigns on Facebook, on Google, on Microsoft, on the different areas. TikTok is another example. And then they’ll see the performance. And they’re able to adjust the balance on these virtual cards to make sure that they still stay within the budget that the customer set for them. So there could be 10, 15, 20, 30 cards out there at any point in time and they are managing their entire campaign or campaigns for those customers. And then when they essentially have to rebuild that customer, there’s a full view of which one of the campaigns was hitting, which one wasn’t, and they can give that reconciled view back to the customer saying, you you asked me to go spend $100,000 to help promote across these segments, and that’s what they do. And so the report is there, and the spend control is there, right? So that’s one thing. Controlling spend, it also makes sure that they get working capital, because it’s going to take time for them to get that and bill the customer and for the customer to pay them. So the float benefit of putting in the card where they get close to 30 days of float, right, ensures that they also are not out of pocket as it relates to them billing the customer and being reimbursed for those different campaigns that they’re running. All right, so that’s one use case. Another use case might be that you’re a logistics company and you essentially built a software that sits over the top of a logistics piece that looks at your shipment, because maybe you’re a retailer and you’re shipping from point A to point B, and point A being your manufacturing site out to a specific retailer or to a warehouse to a retailer. And you’re essentially looking at any point in time, which of the providers, USPS, FedEx, etc. is going to give you the best rate. And you find the best rate, and it’s all programmatically happening. You then assign a virtual card to settle for that particular shipment. Again, total transparency, total control, and you get the working capital benefits, but it’s embedded in a process that is allowing them to automate the picking up of an account to settle a transaction. Right? So again, you see a lot of this upstream-downstream systems, and the virtual credit card is the one that connects these two things together and creates that efficiency. And that’s where you see a lot. Now there are other use cases that I’m sure everyone, every listener can relate to, which is great, I have an employee, I have an intern, they don’t have a car. They need to travel to a conference. They need to come to the office. They need to do something. They need an account. And rather than having them spend on their own cards and then get reimbursed, we’re able to also support those type of use cases. Now they’re not big dollar amounts, but what they are is a huge headache for these companies. And obviously that’s much more in the big market segment, the bigger companies have more of these types of use cases. So, not a lot of of physical dollars, just a huge process efficiency that you actually solve for them and how they reconcile and reimburse or avoid reimbursing employees because they do all the controls up front.
PR: So, the end user of your product, are they more on the enterprise side, or does it go all the way down to small businesses?
AJ: We are very much focused on what I would call the emerging middle market.
PR: Okay.
AJ: As defined by the Center for the Middle Market, which is really companies that are $10 to $50 million in revenues, typically sub 250 employees, right? They wanted access to this, but couldn’t because they were not big enough, scalable enough. And what we see is, actually if you take the adoption friction out, there is huge demand. In the same way there is demand for credit cards across the consumer all the way through to the largest of enterprises, there is a demand for virtual cards across the ecosystem, too.
PR: Right.
AJ: We serve the enterprise customs of top end on those type of use cases that I was talking about which is sort of more the uncarded traveler or the uncarded employee. Again, but that’s not in a world of seven and a half billion dollar run rate of volume that we’re helping our bank partners generate through these digital credit cards. Maybe 2 % of that is on travel, right? The rest much more on these sort of B2B use cases, right? That straddle, some of the examples I gave you, and goes into construction and all sorts of other verticals as well.
PR: So I’m curious about how you interface with the mobile wallets like the ApplePay and GooglePay wallets of the world. Does the end user see the Extend virtual card in their wallet?
AJ: So that is an innovation. And you might say, what do mean that’s an innovation? The wallets themselves are what, about 10 years old?
PR: Yep.
AJ: Something along those lines. But what people struggled to get a head around was that virtual cards, in the end themselves, were a token. And so the networks struggled to tokenize a token. It gets highly complicated because they were both being pulled from the same bank of card numbers. I’ve already pulled you from this from this bank. I can’t pull it again from the bank. So essentially, a bit of technology work had to be done. And we were the first to launch this both with Visa and MasterCard and with Amex, the idea that a virtual card could be taken and put into a wallet. Because, really, since COVID, the adoption of contactless payments has gone through the roof.
PR: Right.
AJ: And so that is a really great innovation and a great advancement, I believe, in that suddenly you were able to arm people with a card account number that could go in your wallet. So now you could go and buy meals at a restaurant, or you’d be able to tap and pay to take the subway or go in and out of taxis, et cetera, et cetera. So actually, you took away a lot of those type of charges that employees again, would still have to go and submit for reimbursements. So again, you’re seeing real advancement in that space, but again, the idea that a virtual card goes into wallets is a pretty new concept.
PR: Right. Interesting. I hadn’t thought about the tokenization of a token. That is interesting technology. So then, what about the accounting systems like the NetSuites, maybe QuickBooks at the lower end or Oracle or whatever? How do you work with those accounting systems?
AJ: So we integrate natively into those accounting systems, and as we grow our business, as you heard, most of our focus has been in that sort of B2B side of the business with sort of somewhere in between a process. And in that sort of use case, there was less need for some of the accounting components, but we’re now sort of head on into launching into expense management, right? The other part of spend management, which is sort of the more traditional T&E side of the business. And so once you get into that game, integration into QuickBooks, integration into NetSuite for the segment that we serve is really critical. Why? Because part of the benefits of generating these virtual cards is you can start to assign data to it. And that data can then help with the automation of the accounting on the backend. The idea of submitting expense reports is kind of, you know, 1990s in terms of the technology. And today, what you’re seeing is, people are getting virtual cards pre-approved, up to a certain spend limit, right? And if you sit within sort of policy parameters, then you charge, and you attach your receipts, and the data flows straight into the accounting system, right? There’s less of a need for some of these reviews to happen because today platforms and systems are picking up anomalies for you. And then essentially you’re sort of querying those upfront pretty quickly so that the accounting flow can hit the systems quicker.
PR: So we’re recording this the week after Fintech Meetup. I know you were there, I was there. There were lots of conversations around AI and I was talking with someone at drinks one evening and we were talking about AI, and he was adamant that AI is just going to take over the financial function for small and medium businesses. There’s a whole like, sort of segment of workers in the accounting space that are just going to be out of a job in five or 10 years. You’re deep in the weeds in this space now, providing what you provide. I’d love to get your perspective on how you see AI kind of in the sort of bookkeeping slash accounting sphere.
AJ: So I’ve always loved data, right? That’s why I’ve stayed around the SAPs of this world, because it’s always been about data. Data has always been at the heart of everything that we try and do in this context. The question about AI was, great, but can I apply the intelligence to an actual use case? Conceptually, there’s always something out there. So I was sort of like skeptical around, okay, when am going to see a real use case around how this gets leveraged? Well, lo and behold, you know, a few months back, we essentially took our API and we put it into Claude and said, okay Claude, tell me who spent the most last year. Tell me which were the biggest transactions. And the output is amazing. It actually starts to tell you that the business intelligence layer, so there’s a big watch out there. If you’ve got to build a huge business intelligence layer that relies on you installing hardware, software, et cetera, et cetera. That piece of the world is rapidly going to disappear simply because, you now have this much more intelligent piece that doesn’t require you to go and architect reports and different things. You can just keep asking questions and it’s really smart in how it returns the answer. It can graph it, right? It can, you know, lay it out for you in a slide and do everything that a finance person has been dying for. Does it replace, you know, is it agentic yet? No, it’s obviously where we think it’s going to go next, which is going to start segmenting the data for you and say, well, I’m seeing a lot of your customers spend in this area. You should think about acquiring more customers in this particular space or you can see now growing number of customers using these features and functions. And so you need to develop those functions so you can help with more automation in the accounting department. Does that lead to a loss of jobs? And from my understanding there is a huge lack of people with the right finance and accounting skills today. So, actually maybe it complements it. Maybe it helps finance people to be able to do more of this sort of insightful look at things and again, continue to be really good partners with the business because they’re actually coming with insights and leveraging the agentic side to sort of automate the boring stuff actually and get you to the more interesting side of the business. Really thinking then where you take your company and where it’s growing, et cetera, et cetera. I think it’s going to deliver more than anything else a great extra set of hands that’s actually going to help businesses as a whole versus ripping and replacing people.
PR: Interesting. Okay. So then, the last question, with Extend, when you’re looking at where you’ve come from, I’m sure you’ve got a product roadmap. What is the vision here in the end game? Are you going to stay in your lane with the virtual cards, or are you taking this in a broader direction?
AJ: So we already have gone broader because as we’ve solved problems with the virtual cards and helped them automate accounting with those transactions, they’ve come to us and said, yeah, but I also transacted my physical cards. And so we’ve already extended it now to say, okay, good. I’ll now take the feed in of your physical costs too so I can sort of look holistically across your organization, how you’re spending, where you’re spending, drive the automation through to accounting, right? And all those different things. So spend management, expense management sort of becomes broader, thinking that initially we were really focused on distribution of cards and the accounting. Now it’s like, no, no, no, let’s look at your whole spend program. That’s already an area that we’re focused in on, as we speak now. I think clearly, within the next quarter some of these insights are going to come to bear on our platform as we start to really be able to push back that information to clients through AI and other tools. We’ve been using AI for a while, more in terms of how you scrape data off receipts and do all those sort of things. But I think the role is going to increase now, over the next couple of quarters. And you can see in the marketplace, there’s tremendous excitement around expense management and spend management. I think more and more people are associating now, that if you have a card, you better have a tightly bolted on expense management set of capabilities, spend management capabilities, because it’s kind of where the industry’s at. The two things don’t operate independently. And I think it’s a lot of these Neo Card issues have come in and have sort of proved, I guess, lot of doubters wrong, that these two things are tightly coupled, and you better have an offering across both. So we’ve seen some sort of acquisitions in this space. I think you’re gonna see more, as more and more of the sort of traditional players sit there and say, I need an end-to-end solution that doesn’t take my customer from one application out to a second application out to a third and a fourth if they want to do reporting versus giving someone a virtual card. So, I think we’re going to see a greater integration and uniformity of things. Now, where does this all go over time? I think the winners here, over time, are actually going to be the software players, the accounting platforms. Because at the end of the day, that’s the ledger. My wife’s a CFO and if it’s not in the ledger, it’s a problem, number one, but two, that’s kind of where they run the numbers from, right? That’s where they start driving a lot of the insights. So whilst there’s been a lot of discussion of like, is it my app, your app, whose app is it anyway? I think the reality is, customers, just like in the consumer world that we live in, want everything to happen right through their apps; it’s embedded into everything they do. Payment is an embedded part of everything you do, really, in your apps these days. We’re going to get to a place finally where, I think, payments are an embedded function of something you do inside of QuickBooks, NetSuite, SAP, you name it. I think the technology is there with the APIs and the fact that these different providers open up their platforms and to make it more real-time. So I think that’s why we’re going to see that big shift. I think the software players become the real winners in this equation. And then it’s not that banks are losers, banks are not. Banks are going to win in terms of, they’re going to focus on what they do really well, which is underwriting, right? Really helping from a true financial sense and make that as broad as possible within the ecosystem. But at the end of the day, I think like you, you know, I’m a bit bored of logging into 17 different applications to try and get through my day. It would just be a lot simpler if I could really minimize the number of interactions I need to have across different platforms.
PR: Right. Right. Okay, Andrew, we’ll have to leave it there. Really, really interesting to learn more about your company today. And, thank you for coming on the show.
AJ: I really appreciate the opportunity Peter. Thank you.
PR: Andrew was really just talking there about one of the secular trends in finance today, embedded finance. While spend management as a category has been really popular in fintech for some time, it makes sense that this will become an embedded offering. And that is what Extend is providing here. Companies can embed Extend’s tools into their existing workflow. It will integrate with their accounting tools and digital wallets, as well as the banking applications. And so it becomes a much lighter lift for the business.
Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.