Given that there are B2B and B2C arms of the business, how do you approach spending decisions for the company?

We really try to take a first-principles approach, where everything starts with the company mission and the company's strategy. That turns into a company budget, and then cascades down to department budgets, and so on.

Twice a year, we refresh the strategy, making sure it's up to date for the current business landscape. In parallel, we think about profit and loss trends, our capital structure, and how much money we have to invest in the business. We then turn that into a more operational resource-allocation process focusing on what we're trying to do. We turn a top-down budget into a bottom-up planning exercise. ROI is the main driver there.

As a multi-faceted, growing company, how do you approach the tension between providing resources and keeping costs under control?

The purpose of finance goes beyond controlling activities — our mandate is to maximize the enterprise value of the company. So we try to keep as many finance-related processes within finance, and only burden the business when it's needed. That means leveraging systems and automation and being thoughtful about designing scalable processes to enable greater transparency for employees into their budgets and spend, and also reduce the overhead on accounting. With Brex, P&L owners have a real-time view into their budgets and can empower their teams with the ability to spend and report on their own budgets.

It all starts with lean processes, great quality financial and operational data, and taking a holistic long-term view of what our finance stack needs to look like. Over the past couple of years, when we implemented a lot of these compliance systems, it wasn't overly painful. We were really just formalizing a lot of the things that we were already working on.

As your business systems increase in number and complexity, what pain points are you aiming to solve, and how will Brex help you address them?

As a technology company, we have a lot of data. Our job is to leverage that data to improve our reporting and forecasts, ultimately leading to better business decisions.

We're a cloud native company, and that means we follow a best-of-breed solutions approach to our finance and other systems. Brex Empower is a new class of product with an employee-friendly UX/UI (user experience/user interface) that allows people to see exactly how much money is left in their budget and allows them to actually spend that money, while letting us track it and do pre- and post-purchase review.

We also saw that this system can reduce our month-end close effort in a more compliant way, and also help FP&A administer the budgets in real-time a lot better, instead of weeks after the fact in the month-end close process. This the first time I'd say the FP&A group can directly empower teams to come up with and administer their own budgets. What this means is providing an end-to-end experience from conception, budget approval and empower the teams to spend with Brex. On the back end, we also have the review and approval processes to satisfy our compliance procedures. You don't want to bog employees down with filling out a purchase order request for every paperclip.