JPMorgan Chase & Co. plans to merge its middle-market technology and emerging growth commercial banking teams to better serve fast-growing startups, Reuters reported last week.
The resulting technology and disruptive commerce industry group will zero in on startups specializing in software, semiconductors, food, health and wellness, lifestyle, and pet products. JPMorgan will use this new group to sell small to mid-market companies treasury, payments, credit and financing services, as well as mergers and acquisitions advice.
But what could this mean for a company like credit card startup Brex, which has targeted young, high-growth businesses that have largely been underserved by the big banks? As the nation’s largest bank by assets looks to gain footing with startups, the San Francisco-based unicorn is looking upmarket to reel in larger, more traditional companies.
Henrique Dubugras, co-founder and CEO of Brex, recently told Bank Innovation that the startups and budding e-commerce firms his company has targeted are meant to stay with Brex as they grow. “A big part of our value proposition is that you can start with Brex and you can scale with Brex,” he added.
Asked where Brex is most innovative, considering its main offerings are plastic products, Dubugras said the company is trying to take a new approach and disrupt in an area where there has been relatively little movement.
“Corporate cards are a huge market, globally and in the U.S.,” he said. “The same thing that Stripe did for acquiring online, Square did for acquiring offline, and Robinhood did for consumer trading, we want to do for corporate credit cards.”
Dubugras said Brex’s current e-commerce customers usually spend about 10% of their revenue on their cards. With annual transaction volumes north of $500 billion for U.S. e-commerce in recent years, he said it’s safe to assume at least $50 billion is spent annually on the corporate cards of e-commerce firms. This illustrates the opportunity for Brex and other startups, but also for banks that are able to pivot and cater to those businesses.
“The problem with startups is that they go out of business a lot,” Dubugras said. “We’ve had hundreds of startups go out of business and we still haven’t lost one single dollar. And the reason for that is, we know when they’re going to go out of business before they even do because we’re monitoring everything, so we can talk to them and help them transition out before that happens.”
When it comes to underwriting startups and e-commerce firms, his company monitors metrics like cash balances and sales volumes on a daily basis to determine if a company is healthy or not. He said this allows Brex to provide credit with no personal guarantees and higher limits, and to underwrite faster than everyone else.
Dubugras said banks, on the other hand, typically underwrite for credit cards by looking at financial history to try to predict financial health and behavior for an entire year at a time. The results can be the need for personal guarantees, lower limits and long wait times for a determination, which he said just aren’t compatible with the needs of fast-growing companies.
The main difference is technology, he said.
“The way the banks’ systems are built is that an analyst goes and looks at the data and then reports back and says, ‘Hey, this is the credit limit for next year,'” Dubugras said. “To actually change your entire underwriting paradigm and say, ‘Hey, now we’re not going to underwrite once; we’re going to underwrite every day,’ is a very, very big fundamental change for these banks. And their technology doesn’t allow for it.”
He said Brex, in the meantime, built its platform from scratch, giving it the flexibility to serve companies small and large, and everything in between.






