Source: SPEEDA Edge research

Background

Questions

1. What is Brex Embedded, who are its customers, how do they (and their end customers use it), and why did you build it?
2. How do Brex's embedded partnerships work from a customer acquisition perspective—are companies like Coupa and Navan existing Brex customers, and does the embedded card serve as an entry point to sell broader Brex services to their users?
3. Is there a difference between BrexPay for Navan and Brex Embedded generally, or do you really see them all as one piece?
4. Why is Brex Embedded strategically important to Brex? How does payment volume derived from Brex Embedded add value to the business beyond its revenue contribution?
5. Can you give an example of how that would work in practice?
6. Is there anything you can share about how the economics work for Brex Embedded?
7. Card issuing companies like Marqeta and Lithic enable software businesses to launch cards. What’s the positioning of Brex Embedded with respect to Marqeta? When would a company go with Marqeta and when should they use Brex Embedded?
8. Can you explain in a little more detail, for folks who might not have in-depth knowledge, how your infrastructure enables you to do this?
9. With programs like Lithic, Marqeta, or Stripe Issuing, you can choose for them to “program manage” the relationship with the bank and handle a lot of the time-consuming back-end work, including compliance issues. How does that compare to what Brex is doing?
10. Brex Embedded customers like Coupa and Sabre potentially compete with Brex expense management, procurement and travel products. How do those customers think about the nature of competition and cooperation with Brex?
11. How does Navan view card partnerships—is the Brex integration primarily a distribution and retention play, and if so, would Navan look to expand this strategy to other card issuers like Ramp or Rippling?
12. The messaging around the announcement of Brex Embedded heavily emphasized global payments. What’s the opportunity that Brex sees with global B2B payments?
13. If Brex can issue cards globally for US companies, what prevents it from serving locally-headquartered businesses in those same markets?
14. What do you think would be the strengths that Brex brings to the table as a hypothetical global consolidator? What gives Brex a right to win in that scenario?
15. How does Brex think about its future revenue mix between interchange, subscription SaaS and interest revenue
16. People like to look at the competition between Brex and Ramp as a horse race. Are Brex and Ramp converging and going tit-for-tat or do you see them diverging and going down different paths? What’s the opportunity for Brex that maybe Ramp doesn’t have?
17. To play devil's advocate for a minute, if I'm an enterprise buyer, I don't care if Ramp has middleware that you don't have, as long as I get acceptable results. Are there other things that you think might put Brex over the top in an enterprise sale?
18. Can you help me understand in more detail why this is such a key point for a US-based global enterprise? Why is it so important that you have local cards in over 50 jurisdictions and the ability to settle and bill locally? What does that do for them? Does it save them money? Does it make them significantly more efficient? What are the main benefits?
19. Where does global payment capability rank among enterprise pain points for corporate card and spend management—is it the number one issue? Is it in the top 3, top 5, or top 10? How should we think about and prioritize the biggest enterprise pain points when it comes to corporate card spend management?
20. How does Brex think about the competition coming from the rise of B2B neobanks which do expense management like Mercury and Rho?
21. In the enterprise market, is Brex primarily winning as a point solution for cards and spend management, rather than as an all-in-one platform? And how does this strategy play out when partnering with companies like Navan for travel and Coupa for procurement?
22. In some of the early marketing around Brex Empower, it seemed like it was being positioned as an all-in-one solution for the enterprise. Has there been a shift where Brex Empower is actually more focused on enterprise corporate card and spend management?
23. There’s something like USD 1 trillion in total global payments being made in the US per year, with about 80% made using checks or other non-card methods. Interestingly, 80% of those transactions were for less than USD 5,000. How do you think about this long tail of transactions currently made via other means that could be done using cards?
24. How crucial is virtual card adoption to Brex's growth trajectory, and where are we in the adoption curve across different enterprise segments?
25. Is it too early to ask you what markets would be obvious choices for Brex if you did expand globally?
26. Could you take us five years into the future? What kind of company do you think Brex will be? What will the market see Brex as at that point?