Bento for Business and Visa Team Up on Cash Flow for SMBs

B2B payment solutions firm Bento for Business today announced it has added Visa Business debit cards to its modular financial operating platform, enabling small- and mid-size businesses to better manage and optimize their cash flows. The companies said the integration of Visa’s debit cards will give the card provider's roughly 30 million SMBs access to Bento’s solutions for working capital challenges including budgeting, expense and spend management, and bookkeeping. Visa customers using the Bento's platform will immediately be able to control expenses prior to purchase, get real-time insights into their cash flow, secure physical and virtual cards, get 24/7 support, and access savings on travel, fuel and other services based on their purchases. Farhan Ahmad, founder and CEO of Bento, told Bank Innovation said the best experiences are short experiences when it comes to banking. "The bank should know what I'm coming in for and do it for me very easily, and instantly, by just knowing what I would want," he said. "That's what we're building towards. We're building something where, if somebody comes to Bento, we should know why they're coming to Bento and we should just give them their answer immediately and let them move on with their day." Ahmad said the company is using some machine learning to extract insights from the data it's collecting and to share those with businesses. "As we get into more of these workflows and as we get bigger, we are very much focused on collecting that information and helping businesses make better decisions," he said. "Today, for example, we can tell people, 'Hey, based on your spending patterns, we think you're going to run out of cash on this day.'" Ahmad said Bento's not yet in a place where it can tell businesses how to fill their coffers again. "Over time, we're going to hopefully tell them where they're wasting their money, and what the utilization is, but we need a few more connection points before we can get to that level of that analytics," he said. Ahmad said working with Visa and other large partners will strengthen and accelerate his company’s mission to help underserved SMBs unlock the fullest potential of their working capital. The Chicago and San Francisco-based fintech has already worked with Mastercard for a number of years. Ahmad, formerly with institutions such as JPMorgan Chase , Discover Financial Services and Barclays , said business banking, particularly B2B payments, will be the next big area for innovation. He said business is by far the biggest profit pool in banking and that banks and fintechs are finally starting to look beyond innovating on the consumer side, where friction has been easier to identify and address. "You see on the consumer side that we're all users of banking products, so we all see where these friction points are, but on the business side, nobody knows what the friction is," Ahmad said. "Unless you run a business, you have no idea, so very few people have innovated there. And it's harder to innovate there." He said businesses transact with businesses in many different ways and while players like Coupa , Bill.com , AvidXchange and Expensify have come into the market and helped businesses digitize much of their workflow, payments are still something of a final frontier. "At the end of all of those transactions, at the very end of it, one business needs to pass a payment credential safely to another business," Ahmad said, adding paper-based payments are still prevalent in the B2B space. "People have built this amazing software that a lot of businesses are increasingly using, that most of their flow is now digital," he said. "The thing that's not digital is payment and payment is always risky because it introduces two kinds of risks to the company. There's a financial risk, meaning the wrong person getting access to money. And then there's a compliance risk, or regulatory risk, which can mean funding the wrong kind of activity, funding terrorism, money laundering, all that kind of stuff." Ahmad said Bento has zeroed in on how to build a safe way for businesses to allow their people and their systems to create payment credentials that don't introduce financial or regulatory risk to their organization. Bento's announcement comes during a busy week in the B2B space. American Express and SAP Ariba on Wednesday announced they entered into a strategic multi-phased partnership to offer buyers and suppliers new payment and financing options on Ariba Network. Amex's virtual card capabilities will be enabled within the SAP Ariba process and platform through APIs, facilitating seamless commerce, secure payments, and easy reconciliation between businesses on a single platform. "Through this new integration available later this year, businesses will have the opportunity to use their existing American Express Corporate Cards to generate virtual Card payments, making it simple for customers to get started without the need to set up and maintain a separate standalone account," a release from the companies said. Also see: New Fintech Unicorn Bill.com Teams with Mastercard to Offer Virtual Card

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