The state of the back office with Torpago

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Financial Revolutionist: What is Torpago?

Brent Jackson: We're building the next generation of business spend management software. The way I describe it is we’re helping companies simplify all of their business spending and back-office needs. We launched with corporate credit cards, and we're quickly adding on new features to help better serve the back office. 

Our core product, Visa commercial charge cards, allow you to better manage the expense process. We built one connected finance platform to issue cards to your employees, empower them to spend and manage the whole expense lifecycle from swiping to approving to syncing with your HR accounting systems, the whole works. 

We’ve got about 1200 SMB customers right now. We're seeing this huge transformation away from the legacy providers to the newer fintechs like ourselves. 

Over the past three years it feels as though, especially for SMBs, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought this urge to digitize. Not being able to physically go to a bank branch anymore, having banks realize that they need mobile deposits and digital-facing services. Has there been a similar phenomenon for these back-office functions?

For sure. Just taking the corporate card: What a lot of businesses would do in the past—and I'm not saying this is by any means right—is they would share a couple credit cards. So the senior folks would have an Amex card that they’d pass around the office. 

That's kind of difficult when you have a remote team across the world or the country. We're totally seeing that in the back office and that’s just one little example with cards. Enter companies like us: all of our cards are tokenized with one or two clicks, and you can add it to your Apple wallet or digital wallet. You've got a card number on the fly anywhere in the world. Getting access to cards in real time has been a huge push for the back office.

What kinds of demands have you seen from the back office over the past few years that maybe you didn't anticipate?

That's a good question. We definitely anticipated it, but maybe not the full scope of it: the need to connect to all the different tools. Whether it’s something like NetSuite for accounting, UKG for HR, or Slack for productivity. The back office plays a lot of roles, and they use a lot of systems, so making sure that you have a modern system that integrates with all your tools is something pretty big that we get a lot of requests for.

We’re also seeing a lot of need for more flexible capital; they're looking for longer repayment cycles, free lines of credit, or charge cards so they can purchase more materials and keep up with demand. 

Where do you see the back office headed both this year and beyond that—and to what extent do you think SMBs are ready for that transformation versus startups, which are more tech-focused businesses?

Traditionally, it was a lot of startups that would champion, utilize, and take advantage of newer technologies around the back office. Traditionally, your more mainstream verticals didn't really benefit from this, but we’re seeing them now on the forefront of automating the back office. The majority of our customers are not venture-backed companies, and are non tech-enabled businesses. We’re seeing that work from home and the pandemic—these winds coming together—have forced companies to see what’s out there. 

And they all want to start using the new technology, whether it's OCR-received intelligence or API connectivity. Going forward, 2023 and beyond, you'll see more back offices get out of Excel and manual data entry, and take advantage of a lot of these tools that are out there to streamline their workflow and just make their lives easier. I think the reach of a lot of these new tech companies is starting to broaden and the back office is definitely benefiting. 

Are there things from a product perspective that are different for serving SMB back offices versus startup back offices? 

At its core, a back office is a back office, but with non-startup companies we definitely provide more professional services like white-glove onboarding. We've built up more automation around the onboarding, the training materials, our 24/7 support, so we definitely have more support. We really try and enable their success a lot more.

Over the course of your interfacing with the back office, what are trends or practices you feel like other fintechs should know about if they want to work in the back-office space?

I think the back office doesn’t get a lot of credit and it’s looking to innovate. They’re always looking for new tools. They're looking to work with new companies. They're looking for ways to improve their team's life and the functionality of the back office. 

I would say if you're a fintech founder, reach out to these folks. They're all pretty receptive.