Spend management innovator and Marqeta partner, Payhawk, has emerged over the past decade to become an impressive B2B platform.
Since its inception in 2018, the business has succeeded in addressing many of the corporate expense pain points facing firms today.
Interestingly, Payhawk’s journey is not unlike ours. We started out with the aim of developing prepaid loyalty card programmes before realising there was a bigger need to transform the issuer processor landscape.
Similarly, Payhawk initially focused on building a proposition to give companies more control over corporate card spend and expense management before it became apparent that managing the entire company expense life cycle, including automated accounts payable with PO and real-time reconciliation, were priorities to tackle. And tackle it they have.
Innovations to date include global employee reimbursement in real-time in more than 160 countries and integrations with scores of business platforms across ERP, accounting and HR verticals.
Reassurance for CFOs seeking to manage employee expenses
But it’s perhaps Payhawk’s most recent iteration that has truly excited the Marqeta team. Tapping into some of our modern issuer processor platform’s most powerful capabilities, Payhawk has launched Advanced Card Controls.
This groundbreaking feature is a huge point of differentiation and is enabling customers of the UK-headquartered business to apply a whole new set of levers to card-based expense management processes.
In developing the functionality, Payhawk’s product specialists identified that some finance teams had already adopted company cards but were either without the controls needed to ensure policy compliance or were facing vulnerability to fraud, posing risks to the organisations.
It also emerged during the research phase that some finance teams did not even want to issue cards for their employees. This was largely due to fraud worries. Yet when pressed, many admitted that card transactions provide much better visibility on spend, and would adopt a payment instrument if it had tools to help enforce company policies and limit transactions to pre-approved vendors and regions.
Four killer areas of control for companies
Thus, Advanced Card Controls was born with a mission to give finance teams control over spending without hampering employees’ access to the funds needed for growth.
In addressing finance teams’ concerns, Payhawk has built out four new areas of advanced spend control which, together, have the potential to form a major plank of any company’s anti-fraud strategy.
The first Advanced Card Control centers on managing transactions by country or region. Businesses can limit spending by geolocation to reduce accidental overseas purchases, or block transactions in countries where there is a higher risk of fraud.
The second area of control delivers time and date functionality that can restrict spending during certain hours of the day, such as between a company’s opening and closing times. It could also be extended to enable employees to purchase fuel while commuting. A key aim here is to reduce the risk of suspicious transactions in the middle of the night or at the weekend.
The third control relates to merchants. This ensures employees comply with preferred vendor lists by blocking or allowing specific merchants. Additionally, businesses can block any non-compliant spending and honour any active supplier-exclusivity agreements.
Finally, Payhawk customers can manage merchant categories with their cards, preventing transactions that might be personal rather than professional expenses. Merchant categories are an effective way to proactively enforce company spend policies.
On top of this, it’s fascinating to see how the business has presented the underlying code for each function in a way that allows finance teams to easily customise controls. This is the essence of open API innovation and aligns with Marqeta’s approach to enabling partners to operate on their terms.
Making the most of Marqeta’s rich functionality
In using Marqeta’s card control functionality, Payhawk has made it much easier for companies to empower employees to spend in a way that aligns with policy and corporate objectives.
This case study also demonstrates that there’s much more to card programs than meets the eye. From Just-In-Time Funding strategies to web push provisioning, the technology goes beyond simple transactions and is capable of solving a range of modern business problems - without adding new processes or layers of complexity.
