Pemo Adds Smart Cards to Spend Management Platform for UAE SMBs

Pemo has added physical and virtual Visa payment cards to its all-in-one spend management solution for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and plans to make the full platform available in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan in the next 18 months.

With the introduction of the new product, users in the UAE can now distribute prepaid smart cards to employees. This capability joins other features of the platform such as digitized invoices, automated approval flows, one-click invoice payments and real-time cash flow monitoring, according to a Tuesday (Aug. 23) press release.

“With the launch of Pemo cards, businesses now have a frictionless end-to-end solution that automatically categorizes employee expenses, captures receipts for every transaction and offers management teams complete visibility on corporate spending,” Pemo Co-Founder and CEO Ayham Gorani said in the release.

Both the virtual cards and the physical cards allow the primary account holder to set parameters, such as unlocking access to select vendors or limiting total spend, and track expenses in real time through a shared dashboard.

The addition of the cards comes about three months after Pemo debuted its platform and got $12 million in a funding round that the company said would be used for more product development and expansion in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Read more: UAE-Based FinTech Pemo Debuts Spend Management Platform

More than 90% of businesses in the region are SMBs, and many of them rely upon multiple platforms, processes and entities to manage their corporate spending, Gorani said at the time.

In the Tuesday release, Gorani said, “Managing efficient employee spend and expense reports in a company is a challenge that any accountant, finance director and general manager can relate to. Our mission at Pemo from day one was to tackle this by eliminating administrative tasks and enabling a healthy spending culture.”