Brex, the company reimagining finance for growing businesses, today announced Brex Empower, a new software platform designed to increase the speed of businesses by enabling a culture of trust and financial discipline.
Empower will serve as the foundation for all Brex products moving forward, starting with a completely new spend management product.
Over the past two years, companies have completely changed how they operate. Modern businesses are giving up the traditional model of command and control, in favor of providing context and empowering teams to make the right decisions, which greatly speeds up the pace of business.
“Brex understands uniquely that to compete, you have to be prepared to move very fast,” said Mike Kim, VP of Finance, DoorDash. “We wanted to empower our employees to make decisions on their own and move fast to spend on behalf of DoorDash – with the right level of compliance and control. And with Brex Empower, we are able to solve for that.”
With Empower, Brex is delivering software that enables distributed, global companies to move faster. It makes it easy for employees to do the right thing, lets companies use a “trust and verify” model to move fast while remaining compliant, and increases accountability for leaders.
Make it easy to do the right thing
People follow processes that are easy. Yet complying with most company expense policies is anything but easy. Empower:
• Eliminates the need to collect many receipts. By leveraging exclusive data from credit card networks and integrations with hundreds of partners, Brex automatically collects and generates many receipts without having to ask employees to track them.
• Makes it easy to understand expense policies. Most employees don’t read expense policies. So Brex created a new way to visualize the expense policy and understand the context for expenses across corporate cards, reimbursements, and bill payment.
Trust and verify
Leaders shouldn’t review everything because reviews are costly and slow. But that’s not how existing financial products work. Empower creates the foundation of a “trust and verify” model:
• Create budgets to delegate spend. Leaders can create and request budgets for teams, trips, vendors, and stipends (such as a work-from-home stipend) with clearly defined expense policies. Employees know exactly what can be spent under each budget, and it eliminates the need for approvals on every single expense.
• Review by exception. Because budgets and policies are clearly defined, managers can focus on only the expenses that are out of policy or over budget, increasing speed. Brex is also introducing an anomaly detection model that uses machine learning to flag suspicious transactions based on the data from the tens of millions of transactions Brex processes.
Increase accountability
Empowering teams to move faster requires a higher level of trust. But to create a culture of trust, companies need systems that keep leaders accountable. That’s why Empower delivers:
• Real-time visibility and accountability. Empower breaks down the silos of separate systems into a single source of truth of where money is going. This lets leaders spend as they need to achieve their goals while still keeping them accountable to their budgets. And it gives finance teams real-time visibility into where spend is happening, as it happens.
“The fastest growing companies always look for ways to fight bureaucracy and speed up the pace of business. We designed Empower to do just that,” said Henrique Dubugras, Brex co-founder and co-CEO. “It allows companies to propel their businesses forward using spend as a strategic growth lever. Empower reflects the next chapter of Brex, one that is built from the ground-up around software to meet the needs of today’s most innovative and fast-growing companies.”