How to solve your business spend management challenges

Business spend management is on everyone’s mind these days. But is it in your service suite? 

For SaaS providers offering business services such as travel management, bookkeeping and payroll to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the integration of embedded finance solutions into their offerings can make a massive difference in their success. Why? Because embedded finance optimizes the management of corporate spending, which can significantly enhance their service offerings and set the stage for healthy growth. 

 Hear from Kate Cardone, our Senior Director of Growth Sales, about how Marqeta handles the back-end card and money movement processes to help customers grow.

Benefits of Using Embedded Finance to Solve Business Spend Management Challenges 

This modern approach to financial management for businesses addresses numerous customer pain points, thus providing a clear path to deeper customer engagement, better customer retention and new revenue streams. In fact, embedded spend management tools offer B2B service providers important opportunities to do all of the following: 

• Deepen customer engagement: Develop programs with the potential for high-adoption rates that create stickier relationships with business customers by offering spend management solutions with flexibility and control

• Increase customer retention: Synthesize data and use resulting insights to better understand customers' needs and preferences, all to generate repeat business and loyalty

• Grow Revenue: Deliver new value that monetizes your customer base while maximizing lifetime value

Business spend management may not be on your product roadmap, however, it’s highly relevant to travel, bookkeeping, taxes, payroll and other B2B services. And when you bake spend management into your service suite, you can also potentially optimize your working capital.  

The Business Spend Management Opportunity for Companies Beyond the Banking Sector 

Many SMBs are dissatisfied with their existing tools, as they often fail to provide the necessary insights and controls for effective spend management. Embedded finance transforms SaaS offerings by enabling companies to deeply integrate financial services within their platforms–including issuing branded credit, debit and prepaid cards. This integration addresses core customer pain points in several ways:

• Enhanced visibility and control: Embedded finance solutions can provide unprecedented transparency into every transaction, helping the business better understand spending, thereby improving budget management. This lack of visibility is a problem for many companies. In fact,  according to research from Coupa, 46% of CFOs report a lack of visibility into spending data, a gap that embedded finance can fill effectively by consolidating spend data in real time.

• Simplified expense management: With granular control over transactions, businesses can specify exactly how, why and where their funds are spent, which improves adherence to corporate spending policies. Moreover, 41% of managers report low compliance with travel expense policies. This can be greatly improved through precise spend controls offered by embedded finance solutions, as found by “The State of Corporate Travel and Expense 2024,” a report published by Navan. 

• Real-time updates and reporting: Embedded finance tools enable real-time control and input over expenditures, facilitating immediate reconciliation. This can replace outdated manual processes—which Navan says are used by 40% of employees—that are inefficient and prone to errors.

• Cost optimization: Embedded finance enables companies to move with new agility, simplifying compliance and reconciliation and delivering insights that can be used to the business’ advantage.

Issuing branded debit, credit and prepaid cards can be an elegant solution to these challenges, consolidating data and providing a flexible and visible tool for employees to use. The client benefits are clear, but they’re not the only ones who can benefit. Embedded finance offers B2B service providers multiple benefits, too.

Advantages of Embedded Finance for SaaS Expenses & Platforms

By incorporating embedded finance, travel companies and SaaS business service providers can evolve your expense control solutions and enhance their product offerings with each of the following capabilities:

• Customizable financial tools: Platforms can offer customizable credit, debit and prepaid cards that meet the specific needs of their SMB customers. This not only provides flexibility, but it also enhances the user experience, thus making financial management more intuitive and less cumbersome.

• Increased customer loyalty and retention: By offering integrated spend management solutions, SaaS platforms can create a stickier product. For example, issuing lines of credit and virtual cards that allow immediate access to funds can significantly enhance customer loyalty.

• New revenue opportunities: Every transaction made with a card issued through the platform can generate interchange revenue, thereby increasing the platform’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) and customer lifetime value (CLV.) Furthermore, this system allows SaaS providers to offer rewards for saving on expenses, incentivizing cost-effective behaviors among users.

Differentiating your offering by embedding a full-spend experience into your platform that simplifies clients’ expense management processes and data gathering can make your product stickier and generate revenue with every card swipe.

Why Choose Marqeta as Your Embedded Finance Solutions Partner?

When you partner with Marqeta, you partner with a trusted category leader, and you will enjoy our comprehensive capabilities and robust security measures. These include:

• Advanced, high-level controls and real-time spending insights: Providing critical oversight for businesses that need to manage their finances closely

• Instant issuance and tokenization: Ensuring that businesses can quickly adapt to their financial needs while maintaining high security

• Tailored financial experiences: Delivering just-in-time (JIT) funding authorization and customizable spend controls for each of their customers 

The integration of embedded finance solutions offers a transformative opportunity for SaaS providers specializing in travel management, bookkeeping, tax and payroll services for SMBs. By adopting these modern business spend management tools, these platform providers can address the prevalent challenges of visibility, control and engagement in business spending. 

Moreover, with these enhanced financial services, the platforms not only improve their own value proposition—they also empower their SMB customers with the tools they need for effective financial management, ultimately driving growth and innovation across the SMB sector.