Modern finance demands smarter spending.

For decades, American Express dominated corporate finance with a model that served businesses well in a pre-digital era. Amex set the standard for things like charge cards, rewards programs, small-business credit solutions, and luxury travel services.

However, as businesses become more digital, mobile, and globally distributed, the limitations of legacy corporate cards like Amex are increasingly slowing companies down — unmanaged overspending, limited visibility, manual expense reports, and persistent accounting errors.

Modern companies like yours deserve better, but Amex has simply not kept up. Brex built a superior solution — a smart corporate card that enables growth with higher limits, powerful controls, automated expense reporting, and real-time insights. It’s why Brex is the preferred finance platform for modern companies — from scaling startups to top global enterprises.

With Brex, you can say goodbye to navigating low or fluctuating credit limits, dealing with capped rewards, or hearing “Sorry, we don’t accept Amex.” It’s why Amex is “keeping an eye on Brex” in the corporate card market. The old guard costs businesses valuable time, money, and opportunities, while smart cards like Brex disrupt a $4 trillion industry by helping companies spend smarter and move faster.

Read on to learn what today’s finance leaders are missing with traditional corporate cards — and why they’re fast-tracking the shift to integrated smart cards like Brex.

The hidden costs of traditional corporate cards.

Traditional corporate cards operate on a fundamentally reactive model. Finance teams issue cards, employees spend, and then weeks later, finance discovers what happened — when it's too late to prevent policy violations or budget overruns.

Cards like Amex and Chase excel at travel benefits and rewards programs, but they lack the upfront controls that enable proactive spend management. Finance teams using these cards are forced into administrative roles rather than strategic leadership positions.

The true cost of Amex, Chase, and Bank of America cards extends beyond annual fees:

• Department heads discover budget overages weeks after they occur.
• Processing a single expense report costs $58 on average and takes 20 minutes.
• Accountants spend countless hours manually reconciling data across systems.
• Employees are spending outside their policies, with no recourse.
• Frequent card declines disrupt global travel and business operations.

While these cards may offer attractive rewards programs, companies shouldn't have to choose between earning points and controlling costs. With Brex, you get both — comprehensive spend management software and competitive rewards — built right into the Brex card.

This growing need for proactive spend management is why forward-thinking finance leaders are seeking Amex alternatives like Brex.

Streamline spend management with a smart corporate card.

Any card can help a business spend money. However, a smart card like Brex ensures you can control that spend, earn more rewards, and automate finance busywork. It’s the modern way to spend smarter and grow faster.

Brex can do all of this because we reimagined corporate finance by integrating financial services and financial software. This unique approach ensures finance teams stay ahead, not just react, with:

• Advanced controls: Pre-set spend controls define limits and policies before cards are issued.
• Easy provisioning: Dynamic card provisioning lets you create virtual cards with specific limits for employees, vendors, teams, and more in seconds.
• Auto-enforced policies: Automated enforcement prevents out-of-policy spending before it happens.
• Real-time visibility: See purchases instantly in your dashboard for real-time monitoring.
• Smart approvals: Sophisticated workflows allow you to customize approval chains with pre-set rules for specific vendors or amounts to apply appropriate oversight.
• Automated expense reporting: Auto-generated receipts and memos and auto-categorization and GL coding automate expense reports and accelerate reconciliation.
• Advanced insights: Detailed reports help you understand trends and allocate dollars to where they can make the most impact.

The result: employees are freed from manual expense work, and finance leaders prevent budget overruns entirely. As one finance leader says: “With Brex, we've reduced unauthorized spending significantly because employees know their transactions are visible immediately and must align with pre-set policies.”

Brex's extensive rewards program can also turn everyday business spending into meaningful cash back and benefits that directly support growth.

So what other advantages does Brex offer that legacy card providers like Amex simply can't? Here are five ways Brex transforms spend management from an administrative burden into a strategic edge for today’s finance teams.

1. Eliminate the expense management burden with AI.

If Amex pioneered corporate cards, it’s playing catch-up on expense management — one of the most significant hidden costs of traditional corporate card programs. With American Express, you typically have to invest in separate expense management software or rely on manual processes that drain productivity.

That means when you sign up for an Amex card, you may also be signing up for:

1. Additional licensing costs for an expense solution
2. Extra hours of work integrating and maintaining two systems
3. Manual reporting processes across a patchwork of financial software

Amex is actively trying to bolster its expense management offerings with its announced acquisition of Center. Brex AI already eliminates manual work by automating the expense tasks that slow you down:

• Automatic receipt capture matches receipts to transactions and generates IRS-compliant documentation without manual input.
• Smart categorization auto-classifies transactions based on merchant data and pre-set GL coding rules.
• Auto-routing workflows send expenses to the right approvers intelligently
• AI-powered anomaly detection flags unusual transactions or spending patterns for review.
• Brex Assistant offloads tedious expense tasks to AI and answers common employee questions in real time.
• Advanced reporting ensures you can generate up-to-date, compliant reports without manual input.

With Brex, more than 60% of expenses are prepared entirely with automations. Expense reviews are completed 4x faster and documentation is submitted 1.7x faster on average, saving more than 300 hours a year compared to traditional programs*. In addition to saving time, Brex improves how finance teams operate, allowing them to focus on strategic analysis rather than administrative tasks.

* Based on internal metrics from December 2024. Past performance does not guarantee future results, which may vary.

2. Move 3x faster with integrated financial operations.

What else could you be doing besides staying up late to reconcile your Amex expenses? Legacy cards operate outside of your core technology solutions and require hours of manual matching of statements to expenses.

Brex functions as a connected component of your broader finance technology stack with bidirectional integrations to accounting systems like QuickBooks and NetSuite, ERP platforms like Oracle and SAP, HRIS tools like Workday and ADP, and travel management software like Navan. Integrate any default or custom field from your ERP or HRIS to automatically provision cards, offboard employees, change your policy, or automate accounting.

These integrations eliminate manual data entry, reduce expense errors, and provide a single source of financial truth. When transaction data flows automatically into your accounting system with proper coding, you’ll improve accuracy and can close your books up to 3x faster every month. And with embedded virtual cards, Brex helps you to achieve 100% reconciliation of global payments in your travel, ERP, and procure-to-pay solutions like Navan, Sabre, NetSuite, and Coupa.

Large enterprises with lots of transactions to reconcile using Brex save more than 750* hours a year by automating expenses and accounting tasks.

* Based on internal metrics from December 2024. Past performance does not guarantee future results, which may vary.

3. Reduce international payment barriers.

Card declines are frustrating and can block important business progress. If they happen in front of a client, they can be embarrassing or unprofessional.

American Express cards aren’t accepted everywhere, especially internationally. Brex is the only card you’ll ever need — whether making purchases in Tokyo, paying a local vendor in Berlin, or subscribing to essential software services.

As part of Mastercard’s global network, Brex cards work everywhere your business needs to spend with universal coverage across 220+ global markets, physical acceptance at 150 million merchant locations worldwide, and digital transaction capabilities across 250 million online payment points.

Further, Brex cards have a single global credit limit and underwriting process across all entities so you can start spending faster. Plus, issue cards and pay statements in the local currency in over 50 countries, eliminating FX markups.

These global payment capabilities prevent card declines, create measurable cost savings, and enable smoother international operations. Ken Liu, Director of Accounting Operations at Huntress, says: “A huge unlock was issuing Brex cards in the local currency to our foreign employees as we grew. Unlike Amex, Brex was able to keep up.”

4. Eliminate unnecessary fees and hidden expenses.

Every premium card fee and FX charge represents money that could be reinvested in people, innovation, or growth — things that actually advance your mission.

Traditional corporate card programs can hit you with all sorts of fees. American Express business cards typically charge $250-$695 annually per premium card. Additional employee cards can cost $50-$300 each, not to mention the cost of expense reports.

For a 500-person company, Amex’s corporate card program could cost $150,000+ per year:

• Premium cards: 15 departments × $550 = $8,250
• Employee cards: 485 cards × an average of $175 = $84,875
• Processing expense reports: $8/report × 3,600 reports a year (60% of employees submitting monthly) = $28,800
• IT resources: To integrate and maintain card/expenses = ~$35,000-$50,000

That’s more than $300 per employee annually or $13,000 a month for the entire organization — even before adding 2-3% foreign transaction fees when spending in USD.

Brex doesn’t charge annual fees for its corporate cards and issues additional employee and virtual cards for free. We also don’t charge foreign transaction markups on local card transactions and provide a fully integrated AI-powered expense management system at no additional cost.

The result? Substantial efficiency gains from Brex's integrated platform and hundreds of thousands in cost savings every year.

Valarie Zometa, Accountant at First Responder Health, says: “Managing our Amex card program was a nightmare. We had no control over who was spending on what, and we kept getting charged for subscriptions nobody knew we had. Plus, we were chasing people for receipts at the end of every month. The day we started using Brex was the day we regained control of our spending.”

5. Position your team for strategic leadership.

When your finance team is buried in manual processes and outdated tools, you're silently telling your best talent: “Your growth isn't a priority.” And every hour spent reconciling transactions is an hour they’re not at the leadership table.

Brex prepares finance teams to lead the future of business. While traditional cards remain rooted in decades-old financial paradigms, Brex continuously evolves its platform to drive trust and enable growth.

Our AI-powered platform offers spend analytics, predictive cash flow forecasting, tools to align spending with business priorities, comprehensive risk management, and globally scalable financial infrastructure.

Choosing Brex means upgrading security, not compromising it. We process $20B+ annually with enterprise-grade protocols trusted by 30,000+ companies from top AI startups to trillion-dollar enterprises. Sleep better with 24/7 AI fraud monitoring, encrypted 2FA authentication, complete compliance certification (SOC 1 Type II, SOC 2 Type II, PCI-DSS), and granular permission controls.

With Brex, you’ll transform the finance function from a cost center to a trusted driver of business value. As one CFO notes, “Brex gave us back the time and data we needed to become strategic partners to the business instead of just transaction processors.”

Brex is the new card standard in corporate finance.

The shift from American Express to Brex is more than a card change — it’s a fundamental evolution in how businesses approach financial operations. American Express may have defined the previous era of corporate cards, but Brex has firmly established the new standard. When it comes to Brex vs. Amex, Brex offers fully integrated spend management that enables you to move faster, without the trade-offs.

Get seamless payment capabilities with proactive controls, intelligent automation, and actionable analytics that help make every dollar count for your business. Our rewards program also helps you earn in top spending categories and redeem points for business-building impact like cash back, billboards, airline miles, and company offsites.

Need an easy way to spend smarter and move faster — around the world? Sign up for Brex today and get the smartest corporate card that keeps pace with modern business.

Brex intends to provide accurate information but cannot guarantee this content is current, correct, or complete.