Marqeta and AffiniPay Team on Law Firm Spend Management

Card issuing platform Marqeta has launched a partnership with payments firm Affinipay.

The collaboration, announced Wednesday (Feb. 28), will see Marqeta power the pending launch of MyCase Smart Spend — a spend management solution powered by a LawPay Visa SMB credit card embedded within the MyCase platform — which helps law firms streamline expenses and manage finances.

“Like many small businesses, law firms and legal professionals are bogged down by manual expense tracking and lose valuable time–and money–reconciling their finances each month,” Marqeta said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. “The launch of MyCase Smart Spend makes MyCase a comprehensive solution in the legal industry that offers a single destination for firm operations and spend management from start to finish.”

By working with Marqeta, MyCase Smart Spend users will have a platform that gives them access to real-time card issuing, transaction data, and spend controls for their credit card offering, the release said, letting them track business expenses and access capital more easily from a single dashboard.

“Marqeta fully understands the complexity of building new card programs that are tailored to the specific needs of legal professionals,” said Bryan Thompson, chief technology officer of AffiniPay.

“We sought a partner that could help us deliver on our promise of giving our customers better insights into their finances and improving efficiency. We’re looking forward to working with Marqeta to bring this product to market and continuing to deliver innovative solutions in credit.”

The partnership follows a number of recent product roll-outs by AffiniPay, including the addition of in-person payments to its product suite earlier this month.

PYMNTS spoke last year with Dru Armstrong, CEO of AffiniPay, about the digital transformation of the legal sector.

“It’s really about the end client,” Armstrong said. “If you look at an attorney’s week, they spend probably a quarter to a third of their time doing administrative tasks that can be automated, and beyond that — they’re probably writing down 20-30% of what they are able to invoice for. That creates 50% leakage.”

Small businesses, such as independent and single-attorney law firms, often struggle in the challenging modern macroclimate — but digital solutions can help them compete and even capture a greater market share, that report said.

“Lawyers are really smart,” Armstrong said, “and I think they are smart enough to understand that with technology comes complexity and a burden — so technology inherently needs to create both [an efficiency] lift along with better outcomes for [legal businesses] and their clients.”