Building a global financial strategy

Lessin started the conversation by asking the panelists why thinking globally is so important right now. Michael Tannenbaum of Brex said he felt the pandemic normalized the idea of having teams all over the world. “So much of the way people are working has changed. It was already changing and the pandemic really just sped things up. Companies of Brex’s size and much smaller are taking advantage of a global workforce. And as soon as you have that global workforce, you’re naturally going to have the need for different human resource, IT and finance infrastructures.”

Alex Bouaziz of Deel, an all-in-one HR platform for global teams, talked about the practical difficulty of growing when you’re only in the U.S. “There’s a moment where the business just doesn’t make sense if you only have people in the [San Francisco] Bay Area and New York. It’s just become very hard to make the business profitable, which is the big focus for the years to come. There is incredible talent everywhere, and you can give a chance to amazing people to be able to work for you. You always need to control your spend, and a great way to do that is to hire globally. ”

Brex postscript:

Brex has understood that going global is a must from day one, since we were founded by global entrepreneurs Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras. We believe in a world where value can be created from anywhere, and we have talent concentrations in the US, Tel Aviv, Canada, and Brazil and remote employees worldwide. To learn how we built a spend solution that serves more countries and currencies than any other, read the latest article from our Director of Global Product Erica Dorfman.

Alexa von Tobel talked about the impact of tools that make working globally easier. “As the world has become flat, there’s incredible asynchronous tools now, from Slack to Loom and all these other ways of working that have made it common to be able to hire exceptional talent, not just in engineering, but in every category across the globe. The tools are just getting better every quarter to make it more of an advantage to do so.”

Though businesses are introducing and adopting productivity and communication tools quickly, HR and financial tools have been slow to catch up. As Tannenbaum said, “There’s this way of collaborating in a remote way that allows you to leverage cost savings, but what hasn’t necessarily evolved is the financial infrastructure. The thing that everybody is trying to do is to make global employees have parity with someone in the U.S.—things like corporate credit cards, expense management, travel, all those financial services that touch employees.…Those are the areas that you should be thinking about from an infrastructure perspective.” In other words, companies need borderless financial solutions that bring their global teams together with one consistent experience on that platform. And Michael noted “that is what Brex offers.”

Brex postscript:

Brex prioritizes delivering an exceptional user experience with 24/7 global support — not simply because we like making people happy — but because an automated, consumer-grade experience leads to higher compliance, which helps you save money and close the books faster. Our spend solution works consistently and intuitively by mobile app or dashboard, no matter where you are in the world, and can be easily adapted to local regulations, currencies, and customs.