What’s next for SMB payments?

This morning, Fyle, an India-based expense-management platform serving US businesses, announced that it launched a real-time spend-management integration for all Visa cards. Fyle said it would roll out similar integrations with other card issuers at an unspecified date.

Why should we care?
While the US SMB business card spend market accounts for around 35% of the $1.5T total market, SMBs face a more complicated payments-solution landscape than their enterprise counterparts. Many fintech card issuers require unrealistic minimum cash balances, and offer short credit periods through charge cards rather than credit cards. And the existing cards SMBs do use often lack direct data feeds from issuing banks, placing them at a disadvantage as compared to enterprises, which receive live feeds through their corporate-card solutions. “We figured the roadblock here was the big banks' outdated tech, and bypassed that entirely by integrating with Visa,” a Fyle spokesperson told The Financial Revolutionist. “We are the first ones to take this novel approach, and there's no one else doing it right now.” This integrative approach can have massive effects on the showdown between old-school banks and scrappier fintechs. Rather than acquire a fintech to build out payments solutions—as US Bank did with SMB payments software company Bento—these banks can refer their clients to Fyle, letting their same card operate as a modern expense-management solution. Depending on Fyle’s success with this semi-whitelabel strategy, we may see other expense-management companies follow in Fyle’s footsteps, even potentially ditching their branded cards in favor of this “bring your own card” ploy.