Lemonade streamlines multi-entity spend on one global platform with Brex.
Company
Lemonade is a full-stack insurance carrier that offers hassle-free rental, home, car, pet, and term life coverage in the United States and Europe. Founded in 2015, Lemonade is now a publicly traded company with over 1,300 employees across the US, Europe, and Tel Aviv.
Challenge
To disrupt the global insurance industry, Lemonade has built an accomplished team with talent from around the world. But as Lemonade expanded, they faced challenges managing multiple spending programs, getting cards that worked efficiently for their teams in Europe, and manual reconciliation of transactions across three vendors to cover expense management for their global team.
Managing multiple vendors was taking valuable time from their finance team, and their various card providers created different experiences and workflows for employees depending on their region. “Before Brex, we had to download all transactions, map them based on a spreadsheet by cost center or ledger account, review the data, and then load it in via a journal template,” explains Mike Duffy, Director, Assistant Controller at Lemonade. “Then we’d review the journal for accuracy and completion.”
Lemonade needed a single platform to combine their global card and spend management solution as well as a direct Workday integration to increase automation, close the books faster, and enable global spend.
“At Lemonade, we pride ourselves on taking something complex and simplifying it with the best user experience possible. We see the same with Brex; it’s now a very smooth process.”
— Mike Duffy, Director, Assistant Controller, Lemonade
Solution
After onboarding to Brex’s integrated global card and expense management product, Lemonade has been able to centralize tools, policies, and visibility for its global team. Operating out of a single platform will enable Lemonade to give their teams around the world the same great Brex experience, and allows the US- and EU-based finance team to seamlessly manage their global expenses in one place. With Brex, Lemonade can instantly issue physical and virtual cards worldwide and pay their card statements in the local currency from the respective local bank account.
“Consolidating onto Brex’s global cards for our teams around the world allows us to see and analyze spend across our entities in one dashboard — all while operating in local currencies.”
— Mike Duffy, Director, Assistant Controller, Lemonade
Lemonade manages team spend through budgets and policies that dynamically translate to the local currency of the team, customize expense policies to local markets, and enable spend with built-in controls. For many transactions, Brex will auto-generate a receipt compliant with IRS and local regulations. And for any uploaded receipts, optical character recognition (OCR) will translate the language or currency and match the receipt to the right expense.
Impact
With automated reconciliation and expense reporting, Lemonade’s finance team expects to close credit card expenses and liability in a fraction of the time it originally took, which will allow them to focus on analyzing and optimizing spend, instead of preparing and reconciling it.
Plus, using the Brex solution will help ensure policy and tax compliance — specific to each entity's local regulations — thanks to budgets with embedded policies in local currency and intelligent receipt capture. That enables every employee worldwide to enjoy a frictionless experience.
“Brex allows us to spend and pay bills for our entities in the US and Netherlands in local currency, which we expect to minimize our exposure to foreign exchange swings.”
— Mike Duffy, Director, Assistant Controller, Lemonade
By issuing cards and paying card statements in each entity’s local currency — and from their local bank account — Lemonade avoids excessive foreign exchange fees, unnecessary money movement around their global bank accounts, and intercompany accounting transactions. “Brex allows us to spend and pay bills for our entities in local currency,” Mike says, “which we expect to minimize our exposure to foreign exchange swings.”
The switch to one global card program also lets the finance team visualize their team’s company spend across entities, available credit limits, and payments in any currency all in a single dashboard, helping Lemonade move spend to where it can have the greatest business impact in real time.
“At Lemonade, we pride ourselves on taking something complex and simplifying it with the best user experience possible,” Mike says. “We see the same with Brex; it’s now a very smooth process.”
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