Andrew Jamison is the CEO and co-founder of virtual card issuing platform and spend management software firm Extend. He was previously the head of B2B corporate payments products at American Express.

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Capital One’s acquisition of Brex isn’t just another fintech headline. It’s a signal.

After decades of lag, business spend management is finally catching up to the rest of enterprise software. The shift from manual reconciliation to AI-powered guardrails isn't just changing how companies track expenses — it's upending who controls the corporate card.

Over the past two decades, we have all seen how every industry, sector, product and service has been fundamentally changed by advancements in technology and user experience design.

But in the world of business finance, it seemed the products and services available to SMBs weren’t keeping up: designers adopted software that let them create and collaborate like never before, marketers doubled down on data-driven software tools, and CRM platforms grew in complexity and capability that created new opportunities to drive value for customers and bottom lines — but the finance team? Manual reconciliation, paper receipts, writing checks; this gap in the market went unnoticed or was undervalued by major financial service providers, but those that recognized it, they are the fintechs we see dominating the headlines today.

Why spend management and expense software are so hot right now

With fintechs now taking a sizable and growing slice of market share, and advancements in AI driving rapid product innovation, major financial institutions are taking notice and racing to meet new precedents for their business customers. Nowhere is this shift more visible than in products and services designed to help businesses manage and reconcile spend.

The types of acquisition plays we’ve seen have been primarily driven by the need for better software solutions that address the painstaking processes that happen between the need to make a business payment and closing the books at the end of the month.

Managing spend and reconciling payments might sound like a small, straight forward task, but for the finance managers who have to do it, and the business leaders who have felt the upstream consequences of reconciliation errors, it’s a challenge that should have been solved ages ago.

The challenge in business spending

Despite years of digital transformation, a large portion of business spending has remained surprisingly manual. Employees front costs on personal cards, receipts get lost, and approvals happen over email. Meanwhile, finance teams are left piecing together what was spent, where, and why — after the fact.

This isn’t a tooling problem. It’s a design problem.

Most spend and expense systems were built around accounting frameworks and centralized controls, not around how modern teams actually operate. It’s like trying to run a modern city on ancient aqueducts. The structure may still function, but it wasn’t built for today’s volume or pace.

This has resulted in friction everywhere and very little room to do meaningful work.

But that’s changing — not by tearing everything down, but by redesigning how spending works on top of existing infrastructure.

1. Businesses are empowering employees with built-in guardrails

Legacy spend systems treat every purchase like a problem waiting to happen. That’s why employees are often blocked from making purchases altogether: forced to submit a request, wait for someone with a corporate card, and then hope finance can sort it all out on the backend.

But that approach doesn’t hold up in today’s workplace, where teams are decentralized, fast-moving, and digitally connected. And we’re starting to see the model flip: Instead of hoarding control, companies are empowering employees to spend within smart, automated guardrails.

Modern spend & expense management tools, like virtual cards, are making this possible. With just a few clicks, businesses are issuing unique virtual cards for a specific vendor or employee, setting spend limits, or creating recurring cards tied to a subscription or project.

The result? Employees can finally move quickly. Finance teams stay in control. And policy is enforced by the system itself, not tracked down after the fact.

2. Finance workflows are more aligned with how teams actually operate

For many companies, finance workflows still live outside the systems where work actually happens. Approving a vendor payment or tracking down a receipt often means jumping between dashboards, emails, spreadsheets, and PDFs. It’s slow, disconnected, and frustrating.

AI can help, but only if it’s built into the workflow itself.

The next wave of tools is bringing finance into the flow of work. We’re seeing spend platforms that connect directly with project management tools, procurement systems, and messaging platforms — bringing approvals, alerts and insights into the tools teams already use.

Mobile-native interfaces, real-time notifications, and policy-driven automations are making finance less of a bottleneck and more of a partner. Instead of asking teams to learn another system, finance meets them where they are.

We’ve seen this play out in consumer fintech. Apps like Venmo, Apple Pay and Robinhood removed friction by fitting seamlessly into daily life. Business finance is now catching up. And as AI becomes more capable, the goal will move from just speed to removing the need for manual decisions altogether.

3. Teams are using data to eliminate “the end-of-month scramble”

For many finance teams, the month-end close has been a constant fire drill. Transactions arrive late. Receipts are missing. Reports get delayed. And even with more tools in the mix, finance has often ended up stitching things together manually just to keep pace.

That reality is starting to shift.

As companies adopt AI-powered spend & expense management tools, they’re beginning to move from auditing after the fact to managing spend in real time. Every transaction is now traceable, policy is enforced upfront, and data flows in cleanly, without needing to be patched later.

This is where AI and automation actually deliver. Not by creating another dashboard, but by doing the work: coding transactions correctly, reconciling automatically, and surfacing only the exceptions that need human review.

The result is less firefighting, more foresight. Finance teams can now spot issues earlier, make faster decisions, and close the books with far less chaos.

Why this moment matters

Financial institutions are taking cues from software companies (or acquiring them outright) to meet rising expectations from their business customers.

The status quo isn’t enough anymore. Software-first platforms have shown that it’s possible to empower businesses to manage spend with speed, control, and intelligence — without ripping out what already works underneath.

We’ve seen this playbook before:

Payroll got smarter with tools like Gusto and Rippling.
Accounting became more accessible through platforms like QuickBooks and NetSuite.
Now, business spend is the next category to shift—from manual and reactive to intelligent and agentic.

And this isn’t just about tech companies. Construction firms, hospitals, universities, and nonprofits; every organization with distributed teams and dynamic budgets is feeling the same pressure to move faster, stay compliant and stay in control.

The gap between how businesses want to operate and what their financial infrastructure enables is finally starting to close. But closing it requires more than better tools. It takes rethinking how those tools interact with the systems, people, and processes already in place.

The bottom line

Business finance never needed to be torn down. It needed a smarter, more adaptive system that acts on behalf of the user, builds on trusted infrastructure, and evolves with how companies actually operate.

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That’s exactly what we’re starting to see. Banks are acquiring fintechs. AI is moving from buzzword to backbone. And finance teams are shifting from reactive processes to systems that enforce policy, manage complexity, and close the loop without constant oversight.

As I often remind my team, Rome wasn’t rebuilt by wiping the slate clean. It was modernized by people who knew what to preserve, what to rework, and where to add strength.

It’s the same approach finance has needed all along — and it’s finally taking hold.