EU CFOs Choosing Digital Spend Management Tools Over Pokie Paper Processes

With an increasing number of startups seeking funding on the regular, there must be strong reasons for investor confidence to keep injecting capital into firms, especially after the initial enthusiasm of the seed and Series A round wanes.

For Ante Spittler, co-founder and CEO of Berlin-based FinTech Moss, which recently closed a Series B funding round of 75 million euros ($86 million), it came down to being able to deliver — “even over deliver” — on key milestones the company had defined in prior fundraising rounds, including growing more than 150% in the last quarter alone.

Read more: Berlin FinTech Moss Gets Closer to Unicorn Status With $573M Valuation After Series B Funding Round

The corporate spend management platform has also expanded the platform OS, which started initially as a credit card for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), into an integrated accounts payable platform that gives customers a complete solution for their spend management, including incoming invoices and cash transactions.

The company also recently launched in the Netherlands — its first market out of Germany. Spittler said the October 2021 rollout was more successful than the firm had anticipated, with 3x growth rates recorded in the first few months.

“With this [launch], we proved that this is not a German product [that] only works for German customers,” Spittler told PYMNTS in an interview. “We are a European company, and we can tailor our product to European needs. [This] also showcases that the addressable market [goes] far beyond Germany.”

All these factors, he said, are reasons why heavyweight investors like U.S. venture capital firm Tiger Global Management have backed the FinTech firm, helping to increase its total funding to over 130 million euros since its inception mid-2020 and boosting its current valuation to over 500 million euros ($562.5 million) after the Series B round.

Since launch, the company has processed over 250,000 transactions and issued more than 20,000 physical and virtual credit cards, numbers that are set to increase following the company’s upcoming entry into the United Kingdom, another market which has “the right macroeconomic factors for our business model,” Spittler said.

Solving the End-To-End Spend Journey

The company’s credit card and platform for holistic spend management competes with other European spend management platforms like France’s Spendesk, London-based Soldo and Denmark’s Pleo. But according to Spittler, there are several elements that give Moss a competitive advantage over these players.

At the top of the list is the approach Moss takes to spend management, which helps companies to not only solve the pain point of travel expense, but also solve the end-to-end spend journey by digitizing the Software-as-a-service (SaaS) Toolkit.

“Last but not the least, we supercharge payment instruments and SaaS tooling with credit — like a flexible source of funding — and [this helps to] create an environment for product development, features as well as use cases on the customer side,” Spittler explained, adding that the unique offering makes Moss “pretty much the only ones to target the market from that angle.”

Customers can also choose the source of funding by withdrawing from a credit card limit or from a general company credit limit, benefiting from attractive cashback offers and high credit lines with payment terms of up to 60 days.

Spittler said the company is planning to expand its product offering with innovations in spend control, liquidity planning and accounting automation that will save finance administrators and accountants even more time on categorizing transactions using predictive analytics, for example.

The overarching goal is to help customers to have better oversight and make better decisions in their spending, such as giving customers an estimate on where they stand in their spending if they run transactions for a specific budget on Moss cards.

This might sound simple for one cost position, he said, but monitoring these expenses for the whole company is another ball game altogether.

“What it comes down to is helping the CFO [chief financial officer], the finance director or the finance administrator get smarter in the way they work, [and] have better tools on hand,” he explained.

An All-In-One Package is the Way to Go

When it comes to the corporate spend management field, Spittler said he doesn’t believe that single point solutions will be sustainable and ultimately, creating a seamless integrated journey for a certain set of activities is what businesses need.

“What will not work is having five different tools for five different spending elements, one for cards, invoices, out-of-pocket expense transactions and direct debits, for example, all with tools that are not integrated,” he said.

That is why he believes that bundling them together and offering smart all-in-one packages for certain activities is going to be one of the most important trends moving forward.

Overall, Spittler said their goal is to positively disrupt the way SMBs work, while acknowledging that they don’t have all the answers.

“We’re not magicians, Moss doesn’t solve all their problems. It’s a toolkit, an enabler with which they can just become better versions of themselves. And I think every minute that we can save, every better decision we can help customers come out with sort of plays into that field,” he said.