Extend has widened its expense and spend management platform in order to support virtually any credit card throughout the three major card networks. It is a move that is targeted at giving small & mid-sized businesses – SMBs much greater agility and also a centralized control when it comes to company spending.
Extend, the New York-based FinTech, remarked that the update enables the businesses to go ahead and connect all of their present company cards to Extend, regardless of who the issuing bank is. The spend management platform goes on to offer a unified dashboard when it comes to spend visibility and also automates expense tracking and categorization along with reconciliation by way of AI-driven tools, which is an area that many SMBs still depend on fragmented card programs or even manual workflows for.
According to CEO and co-founder of Extend, Andrew Jamison, businesses should not have to overhaul their present financial infrastructure in order to gain visibility and, along with it, efficiency. Through enabling almost any bank credit card so as to connect with Extend, he added that they are eliminating the barriers that go ahead and keep companies tied to manual as well as outdated processes.
It is worth noting that the expense management tools have gone on to become growingly significant when it comes to SMBs amid the operational costs that are growing, distributed teams, and also very complex payment spectrums. Extending card-agnostic support goes on to position the platform to help capture a much broader segment when it comes to the SMB market, where the finance teams often make use of a mix of cards and also lack the automated reconciliation systems.
Users can now go on to consolidate card activity from any bank, go ahead and maintain their preferred card programs as well as rewards, and also automate receipt capture along with matching. For customers whose banks partner directly with Extend, the spend management platform also layers certain deeper spending controls along with virtual card capacities in addition to the existing card programs.
Jamison added that this update is quite a significant step in their mission to democratize the modern payment experience. He further added that the objective is to offer SMBs a completely out-of-the-box and AI-powered choice vis-à-vis the manual expense workflows.
The expansion highlights a rising trend among the FinTech platforms that are looking to integrate more tightly with the present financial infrastructures and not replace them with a strategy that continues to resonate with the SMBs looking out for flexibility without sacrificing the well-established banking relationships.