Brex is automating the accounts payable process with AI-driven expense controls across multiple payment types to help business clients manage their budgets. 

The San Francisco-based digital bank recognized barriers between bill pay, card payments and Automated Clearing House wire transfers and built a solution to automate the manual processes that generally fall to accounts payable teams, Brex Chief Operating Officer Michael Tannenbaum, told Bank Automation News.

“For better or for worse, the way that you pay for different vendors is separate and distinct because of legacy bank technology,” Tannenbaum said. 

Accounts payable teams, in the past have had to create separate policies for corporate cards, wire transfers and other payment types, he said. Now, businesses can take the rules they were already going to implement and automate those triggers to remove the need for manual reviews. 

The Brex Payables product uses AI and optical character recognition technology to read an invoice and determine whether the extracted information falls into policy. If it does, the money can go out; if not, it will be flagged, Tannenbaum said. 

The Brex product, which launched today, was built in-house by Brex and lives on the digital bank’s Empower platform, Tannenbaum said. Because the technology benefits from the same connections, APIs and integrations as Brex Empower, a client who is live on the Empower platform can implement the Payables solution nearly instantly.  

Brex Payables clients include Alchemy, Northern Data, Revelo Talent Corp. and Yassir Inc., according to a Brex release. 

Automated accounts payable trend 

In other news, small business banking platform provider Bluevine also launched an accounts payable solution this week.

The automated business payments management solution streamlines the accounts payable process, including bill capture and storage, payment scheduling and automatic accounting reconciliation, the release said. Bluevine customers can access the feature from their business checking accounts as the company look to provide all-in-one digital banking services to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Bluevine’s customers are SMBs and “are not the type of individuals who will go and find a point solution for a particular need,” which allows the company to handle all banking needs for customers, Charles Amadon, senior vice president and general manager of banking at Bluevine, told BAN. 

“For the most part our customers are looking for everything baked into their checking account,” Amadon said. “When we spoke to [customers] about where they were spending their time and where they needed the most help in saving time, accounts payable became a really obvious opportunity.”  

The automated solution has been in beta testing for more than a year and the fintech might work on an automated accounts receivable solution if Bluevine’s customers request it, he added. 

Bluevine partners with Coastal Community Bank, member FDIC, on the back end of its banking platform, and has served over 500,000 SMBs since it was founded in 2013, Amadon said. 

The company is looking to explore AI tech and implementing it on its platform, Amadon said, adding that AI can be “very empowering for business owners.”  

In April, Bluevine partnered with payments company Wise to provide international payments options for customers and expand BlueVine’s range, Amadon said.