Advanced Automation Helps Enterprises Manage Spend on a Global Scale

Companies navigating the shifting landscape of global commerce see the promise of new markets, of bringing their products and services to new geographies.

As they do so, they establish offices and workforces in far-flung territories to tap into global supply chains, sourcing supplies and other inputs. Keeping track of day-to-day operations is a challenge for finance teams, as they must grapple with the complexities of each local operation and several currencies, ensuring that corporate spend policies are adhered to by their remote and distributed workforces and that tax and compliance mandates are satisfied.

That’s easier said than done, especially for smaller enterprises that have relatively limited staff and resources on hand. Technology can help, but as Mesh Payments CEO Oded Zehavi told PYMNTS: “Through the past few years, there has been a lot of noise around spend management. Too many people and too many companies have been referring to spend management as a category.”

He said this blanket approach misses the mark, given the fact that companies across any number of verticals — and of all sizes — have different needs when it comes to back-office functions and payment use cases. Mid-market and smaller enterprises, with a few thousand employees out in the field, so to speak, have been relatively underserved by spend management providers, particularly the largest providers.

“That’s where we come in,” said Zehavi, who noted that Mesh Payments is focused on providing these customers with traditional card and corporate spend platforms. Some providers may not support multiple currencies as settlement currencies — and some cards may be accepted in some countries but not in others.

Looking for a Single Provider

Smaller firms want a single provider to help service all their payment needs across all territories in which they operate.

To that end, Mesh Payments said Wednesday (May 31) that it is expanding its unified spend management platform.

The expansion supports global multinational businesses operating across Europe, the United Kingdom and Asia with international entities — more fully automating manual tasks tied to spend management, issuing local currency cards and helping support transaction settlement in local currencies.

In terms of mechanics, the company’s dashboard synthesizes and summarizes activity occurring across these far-flung entities and then with direct enterprise resource planning (ERP) integrations brings transaction-level details into firms’ general ledgers. Zehavi said the announcement marks a broadening by Mesh from its initial niche of servicing mostly U.S. companies toward servicing companies that have global issuing and reimbursement/payments needs.

Historically many companies have pursued an approach to spend management wherein employees would spend their own, personal money on behalf of their firm, submit receipts and be reimbursed later. But as COVID ravaged the globe, upended supply chains and stressed individuals’ wallets, said Zehavi, that approach has become untenable. Against that backdrop, a growing number of companies have sought to provide their employees with cards to pay for everything from procurement to travel.

“We’ve seen, and we know what the challenges are, when you want to issue cards” in multiple territories or when firms want to conduct business in several currencies, said Zehavi. He noted that the Wednesday announcement from Mesh expands the firm’s infrastructure to help “pay out” reimbursement into employees’ local bank accounts, automate spending controls and ensure that when client firms “close the books” on a given timeframe of activity that it is done with the tax and compliance requirements automated too.

Mesh Payments, he said, has been able to work with different third-party providers and use its own infrastructure to make sure that virtual card issuance, spend management, reimbursement and card issuance are done in a unified manner.

“A lot of corporate spending is moving to virtual cards … and firms are gaining confidence in the level of control and monitoring the infrastructure gives them,” he said.

Looking ahead, he said, Mesh Payments will seek to add more territories, with more customer announcements in the works, and more customer wins.

As Zehavi told PYMNTS, “global payments are complex and require a deep understanding of both the local capabilities when it comes to transactions and also the global implications of B2B payment. And that’s where we’ve been investing our efforts.”

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