Corporate spend management is critical for any organization.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a small startup trying to scale, or a multinational enterprise doing billions of dollars in revenue; they all have to keep a close eye on spending to ensure they have ample cash on hand and stay compliant.
Overseeing of all those outflows isn’t easy, though. The bigger a company gets, the more it spends, and the harder it becomes to keep tabs on everything. Not only are there the employees’ salaries and expenses to take into account, but also supplier’s invoices, subscriptions for business tools, and advertising and marketing. And don’t forget the office utility bills.
The whole process gets even more complicated when companies rely on a cobbled-together set of legacy platforms for accounting and payment processing.
“Our typical customers previously used legacy expense management processes,” explained Payhawk Founder and CEO Hristo Borisov in an interview with PYMNTS. “This means using one solution for expenses, another for cards, then a third system for accounts payable, and so on.”
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It all leads to a massive disconnect that forces organizations to spend hours manually reconciling their payments with expenses just to close the books at the end of the month. It’s this disconnect Payhawk is trying to remedy with its all-in-one financial management platform aimed specifically at high-growth multinationals based in Europe. It aims to replace the array of expense management tools companies currently use with a single solution that consolidates all their outgoings into one portal.
As it heads into 2022, expansion is the name of the game for Payhawk. The company, which has enjoyed a year of rapid growth, with transaction volume through its platform rising by 663%, has just closed a $112 million Series B funding round that will be used to push into new markets.
Read more: B2B Spend Management Startup Payhawk Closes $112M Series B
As part of that push, Payhawk is planning to add to its suite of services with the launch of new company credit card and cross-border payment solutions early next year.
“It’s all about providing a smooth and integrated experience,” Borisov said. “We already have complete automation in the accounts payable process, and the ability to reimburse employees or pay your suppliers in euros and British pounds.”
The new solutions are essential to Payhawk’s expansion plans. Borisov pointed out that moving upmarket requires having more flexibility, and large enterprises are used to having credit. At the same time, Payhawk wants to be able to close the end-to-end cycle on business payments, and to do that it has to be able to handle cross-border transactions within its platform.
Through its credit card offering, Payhawk will have the advantage of being able to serve businesses in more than 30 countries. While businesses that operate in only one or two areas around the world have numerous credit card options, Borisov said that often isn’t the case for multinationals with offices located all over the globe. Payhawk aims to give them the opportunity to use a single credit card provider in multiple markets.
“The unique thing is that you get all of these business payment automations in a single system,” Borisov said. “This hasn’t been possible before.”
Payhawk’s plans also entail a hiring spree, although Borisov said the company is only interested in the “top 1%” of the talent that’s currently available.
See also: Payhawk Launches New Enterprise Suite, Cash Back
The addition of new talent and products will help Payhawk get closer to fulfilling its promise of simplifying spend management. When that happens, he said the company will be ideally positioned to serve the high-growth multinational businesses it’s so explicitly targeting.
At present, most must juggle numerous systems and multiple banks to manage their payments, and the only way they can really deal with that is by scaling their headcount. But that goes against the ethos of modern high-growth, digital-native companies that aim to operate with a far more streamlined workforce.
“[They] prefer to use tools to scale faster rather than just aggressively hire people to deal with the back-office work,” Borisov said. “The problem we are trying to solve isn’t going anywhere, and it is a huge market. We have the funds to capitalize on this opportunity; now we just need to continue executing.”
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