Alex Lazarow is an author, speaker, global venture capitalist and contributor to The FR.

The corporate spend management race is heating up. Ramp is scaling rapidly. Mercury is expanding beyond banking, and the competition to own every financial workflow is intensifying. Capital One's $5 billion acquisition of Brex in late January may have closed a chapter, but some clear throughlines are playing out.

The companies winning in business banking share a few things in common: global perspective, smart entry points, and good timing. Here's what we're learning from the competitive field so far.

1. Geographic arbitrage creates categories, not just companies

When I was writing my debut book Out-Innovate (HBR, 2019), I interviewed the Brex founders, who were backed by Andre Street, the co-founder of Stone, a Brazilian fintech unicorn.

What struck me at the time was the role of cross-pollination of ideas across geographies. The Brazilian founders of Brex, Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, saw an opening that American bankers missed because they understood how different customer segments required entirely different underwriting models. They didn’t copy a model from one market to another, but brought an outsider's perspective to identify gaps incumbents can't see, and combined it with global experience.

At Fluent, we see this pattern repeating across our portfolio. Certain models, particularly with local network effects in regulated industries (notably fintech) create waves around the world — companies like Float (Canada), Pleo (Europe), Jeeves & Clara (Latam), Conta Simple and Kamino (Brazil), Razorpay (India) or Aspire (South East Asia). Disclosure: I am an investor in Clara and Kamino.

There are many examples of successful immigrant founders bringing global know-how to win in the US.

2. Finding the right wedge Is a secret weapon

Brex used corporate cards to get in the door, then cross-sold treasury, bill pay and expense management. The card was the hook. Ultimately, the broader platform was the business.

Some have argued convincingly this was where most of the value accrued.

Ramp is executing a similar playbook and expanding aggressively with an ever-growing (and self-reinforcing) product suite. Corporate cards get them in the door, but from there, they can layer on everything from bank accounts, treasury management, bill payment, etc. Mercury is executing a similar playbook, albeit starting from a different place. Mercury began as a modern SMB neobank and is now expanding into overlapping products.

Rippling calls this the compound startup: finding a solid wedge, then adding products where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The wedge often has the most value when it is a hair-on-fire problem. Getting credit cards for unbankable startups qualifies. Bonus points if they are high-frequency, painful transactions that keep the customer coming back. Corporate cards have one additional advantage: they sit high in the decision-making stack, often set up by the CEO at founding, and touch multiple departments over time.

3. Timing the wave matters more than we admit

Brex launched in 2017 when fintech funding was accelerating. They raised their big rounds in 2021-2022 at peak valuations during the boom. While they are exiting in 2026 as the market normalizes, they caught most of the fintech wave and the best of the Covid days, amassing a low-cost war chest.

Founders who started two to three years later are now facing a much harder path: higher customer acquisition costs, more skeptical investors, mature competitors, and a tighter funding environment. Building a comparable war chest at an early stage would be comparatively rare today.

The battle for the business banking customer is far from settled. If anything, Brex's journey — from startup card issuer to full-stack platform to acquisition target — shows how much room there still is to build. Ramp, Mercury and others are racing to own the financial operating system for companies, and the winners will be the ones who expand fastest beyond their initial product.

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The next chapter won't be shaped by corporate card companies, but by whoever owns the most workflows.

A version of this piece was published in Forbes.