Brex is getting creative with its data.

As the corporate card startup takes steps toward becoming a fuller service financial institution, it is rethinking how it ingests new types of data and applies the information it already has in novel ways. These efforts have yielded a new credit product that offers an instant payout option for e-commerce clients and provides sellers early access to sales revenue.

The Instant Payouts product is “basically for smaller e-commerce customers. They oftentimes have to wait in order to get paid from the platform they’re selling on,” said Erica Dorfman, vice president of cash at Brex, in a panel at the Banking Automation Summit last week. The instant payout option is “a credit product that allows them to grow their business, which is effectively our primary goal.”

San Francisco-based Brex was founded in 2017 as a way to get corporate cards into the hands of growing companies, but the startup has larger ambitions. The instant payouts option, launched last month, builds on Brex’s cash account, which launched last year to expand beyond cards and foster deeper client relationships.

According to Dorfman, Brex examines actual sales revenue generated by e-commerce clients to determine how much cash to front. The company’s data teams work closely with the business and credit teams at Brex to build new solutions for clients. She added that the payment and transaction information Brex collects is used in conjunction with machine learning and pattern matching to help the company identify fraud.

Brex offers its financial services to e-commerce sellers, life science companies and startups. The company’s cards make money on interchange rather than interest. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the company shifted its rewards points to appeal to startups dealing with new challenges. Brex has raised more than $732 million in total funding since its founding, according to Crunchbase.

Dorfman said during the conference that Brex prioritizes a clear understanding of client payments. An increase in ad spending, for example, might indicate fraud or merely be the result of a company’s adjusted calculus.

“We have to be really thoughtful about how we think about processing those payments and ingesting them to make sure we have the right balance between pulling back what shouldn’t go through and making available what should,” Dorfman said.