Dealerships are running on disjointed finance stacks

Tekion has spent years rebuilding automotive retail on one AI-native platform, connecting OEMs, dealers, and consumers through the Automotive Retail Cloud. Brex has spent those same years rebuilding corporate finance, with AI-native cards, controls, and the embedded infrastructure that puts global payments inside the workflows a business already uses. When we compared notes, we kept landing on the same gap.

Dealer groups are some of the most operationally complex businesses in the country, yet the money that runs them moves through tools that were never built to work together: legacy corporate credit cards for some spend, manual ACH and wire transfers for others, physical checks for the rest, and an Excel spreadsheet trying to hold it all together. None of them connect to each other, let alone to the platform the dealership runs on.

So accounting teams cut more than 100,000 checks a year at roughly $5 each, often to settle an invoice of $50 or less, and spend their days matching transactions by hand across every store.

That's the gap we built Tekion Spend to close: the best card infrastructure in the world, living natively inside Tekion, so the work and the money finally move on the same rail.

Introducing Tekion Spend, built on Brex Embedded

Brex for Tekion Spend is the fully embedded corporate card solution built directly into Tekion, giving dealers modern card issuing, real-time controls, and reconciliation that lives where the work happens. But the part we are equally proud of is how it came together: two teams building one system, into each other's platforms, from the start.

Tekion understands the dealership at a level no corporate card company ever has: every repair order, parts invoice, and workflow that governs how a dealer operates. Brex understands the financial infrastructure underneath it all, global cards, real-time controls, and the embedded rails that let a transaction be issued and reconciled without anyone leaving the platform they are working in.

We put our points of view together and asked a simple question: what would dealership spend look like if it were native to the dealership instead of bolted on beside it?

The answer is Brex for Tekion Spend, a product where the controls live where the work happens. Cards are issued the moment a PO generates. Transactions are matched to the repair order before anyone has to think about it. Expense policy controls are enforced at the rooftop, department, or employee level automatically.

And it carries the credibility a dealer group needs before they trust anyone with their operating spend. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Capital One, Brex pairs the speed of a modern fintech with the scale and institutional weight of a national bank with deep roots in the automotive industry. For dealers, that combination is rare: the pace of a startup with the backing of an institution, inside the platform they already run on.

Why together beats either of us alone

We each could have gone to market with something of our own, but neither would have solved the real problem nor built something dealers truly want.

Tekion Spend was built to facilitate all dealership expense management (focused on banking and credit card spend). Tekion needed a best-in-class corporate card, and they chose Brex because of its ability to control the user experience while bringing a world-class user experience to auto dealers.

A dealer group's complexity lives across multiple rooftops and entities, international OEM parts, and a back office still cutting tens of thousands of checks a year to pay invoices smaller than the cost of cutting them. Solving that meant building into each other's systems together, not handing a customer a connector.

So we mapped how dealers actually work and built the finance layer to match. The CFO gets a single account across every store, and each GM keeps the autonomy to run theirs. The float trapped in paper checks comes back to the business. The work and the money finally move on the same rail, because we built one product instead of two that sync.

This is what Brex Embedded was made to do, and what Tekion ARC was made to carry: best-in-class finance, living inside the system a business already depends on.

What dealers are telling us

The early signal from dealers is strong, including Ewing Automotive Group. Autumn Ross, their Chief Financial Officer, shared:

"As a dealership utilizing Tekion, having a Brex spend card natively embedded in our ARC is exactly what modern dealerships like ours have been missing. Full visibility, accountability, and more efficient workflows, seamlessly integrated into how we already function. The redundancies eliminated and efficiencies gained translate to real, measurable savings that go straight to the bottom line. We're a high-volume store, so Tekion Spend means a Brex card is issued the second a PO is approved, and the transaction is reconciled to the right repair order instantly. That's hours back, every day."

Available now to select dealers

Tekion Spend is available today to select Tekion customers, with a broader rollout across Tekion's dealer network planned through the rest of the year.

In a business where every rooftop, every repair order, and every check adds up, Tekion Spend gives dealerships hours back, working capital freed up, and a level of control a dealer group has never had before.

To learn more about Tekion Spend, visit here.